L&B Journals

The Meltemi winds blew strongly across the surface of the Aegean as our little polished wooden boat bowed from side to side, its deck almost dipping into the olympic blue waters. Frothy white waves whipped at the hull and the breeze yanked at our hair with a fury as though sent from Zeus himself; this inflicted a bout of seasickness across the entire crew, save for the captain who was steering merrily in his white cap and T-shirt, a glass Evil Eye swaying behind his head, all too familiar with the mercurial ways of the Gods.

Our destination was the small volcanic island of Palea Kameni, a short sail across the caldera from Santorini. Unlike Santorini, which receives 3.4 million visitors annually, Palea Kameni was officially uninhabited- unofficially however, was a different story.

Ancient Thera was the name of the large volcanic island that stood in this spot, towering over the seas. Around 3,600 years ago the island’s volcano erupted with such force that it blew a hole right through the centre of it, submerging most of the land underwater. The rim of the volcano is all that’s visible today, made up of the islands of Santorini, Therasia and Aspronisi, with Palea and Nea Kameni later formed out of lava at the centre. It was this eruption that inspired the legend of Atlantis.

Our little boat skirted the island of Nea Kameni (Greek for “new burnt island”) on its journey to Palea Kameni (Greek for “old burnt island”). Nea Kameni certainly was a sight to behold with its jagged pitch black surface that looked too inhospitable to even walk on, let alone grow food or live. Our captain took us to the west of the island where we laid eyes on the first of the two thermal springs, marked unmistakably by a vibrant orange tinge to the water around the island’s shore, and told us that it was a popular fishing spot for locals.

These thermal springs were created by the still-active volcano which had erupted as recently as 1950, which was responsible for creating Nea Kameni 425 years ago, and Palea Kameni around 2,000 years ago.

The island we were approaching appeared to be trying its utmost best to be both uninhabitable and uninhabited, made of jagged pumice and dacite rock, too salty and too windy to support anything but the most resilient of plantlife and with no native fauna. Its only natural resources were the sea and the thermal spring that bubbled up from its cove, yet as we sailed into the crude port a scattering of buildings could be seen perched along the coast. Among them were a handful of tan buildings hewn from the native stone, a bright white Orthodox church and, in the far corner, a small domed building made of rock and cement that would’ve blended entirely into the landscape if it were not marked by a sunbleached Nestlé umbrella. This was our destination.

Chaos ensued as our boat docked and we scrambled to unload several dozen kilos of camera gear while a large Alsatian barked defensively at us. A man soon appeared in the doorway wearing a T-shirt, briefs and little else but a grin. His name was Sostis, and his life read much like a Greek myth.

The legend goes that in his younger years he’d worked as a tour boat operator around Santorini, and before long he’d fallen in love with a fellow Italian tour guide. When she did not return his feelings and returned to her home country the unrequited love drove Sostis to settle on then-uninhabited Palea Kameni, one of the most inhospitable islands in the Aegean Sea. Here he has lived for the past 40 years, making a modest hermitage, keeping livestock and growing a small number of crops; the rest of his supplies he fetched from Santorini. In time he has become both a local and international legend, inspiring many tales and poems and even boasting his own Wikipedia entry (or his goats do, at least).

Sostis set about preparing us coffee from a gas stove just inside his doorway; we spotted a pile of washing up on the ground next to the rust-coloured sea and hoped this wasn’t his only sink. While the coffee was brewing we took the chance to take a look around his home.

Sostis’ hermitage was a modest domed-roof building, half cave house and half concrete construction, with a mezzanine storage area, bunk bed and enough pots and pans to stock a restaurant. He had bags of grain, bottles of water and gallons of olive oil- enough to last a month, at a guess. 

He brought the coffees out and we began a conversation, all seven of us crammed onto his tiny porch, while the translator plied him with cigarettes. We asked him what life was like alone on this island, how he got supplies, whether he used the hot springs that were just outside his door.

“Man, woman. Woman, man. Woman wants to kill man. No love for man. No love for woman…”

Everything we asked him, his train of thought circled back around to ‘the woman’. At first he appeared wise and philosophical, entrenched in the deeper meanings of love and life with little time for superficial details and practicalities. However, after trying for over an hour to get some usable interview footage, phrasing and rephrasing our questions, it began to dawn on us that perhaps Sostis’ mind was no longer all there. Special praise had to be given to the translator, who was tirelessly interpreting nonsensical Greek musings into both English and Japanese without the faintest idea what any of it actually meant.

“How does love make people better?” Sostis asked at one point. I considered my answer carefully while Ben continued to probe him, eventually giving up on our premeditated questions and beginning to ask Sostis more along his own line of thinking.

He was just about getting through to him and uncovering more of the “man woman, woman man” mystery (it was about a solider and mafia member, likely the husband of the woman he loved, who sought to kill him and had forced Sostis to flee for his life and relocate to the barren island) when the crew’s cameraman made a point of putting down his camera with a loud tut and exclaiming that we had “wasted two hours with a crazy person”, thus putting an end to the conversation.

Sostis then set about making us a lunch of spaghetti, and roped us in to help. We each cut and peeled an entire garlic bulb on the bare concrete table outside which Sostis then fried in about a litre of olive oil, before adding a further two litres of cold water to the hot oil while we stood well back in fear.

By the time the spaghetti was boiled his kitchen was smelling rather delicious, and he brought the huge pot of food outside to us with three large rubber-bottomed bowls that looked suspiciously like dog bowls and three sandy forks. I passed these discreetly to our fixer who worked to quickly scrub them clean with hand sanitiser in the background while Ben kept Sostis chatting and I eyed both his dog and the bowls dubiously. The meal was tasty, but we couldn’t help wondering if we’d end up with food poisoning the following day.

In the background, ship after ship was sailing into the tiny bay fully loaded with tourists, anchoring then proceeding to dump their cargo into the water like swarms of bycatch. Giant speakers crackled to life blaring cheesy Eurodance and EDM from the deck while dozens of tourists would dive off and into the sea yelping and screaming before swimming into the rust-coloured bay to snap selfies in the hot spring. Sostis seemed indifferent to the commotion, no doubt used to it by now and perhaps enjoying the not-so-total isolation, although we found it quite perturbing. Perhaps the idea of a true desert island no longer existed, at least in Europe on the cusp of a destination that had become a poster child for overtourism in recent years.

As evening drew in our boat had been called to pick us up, but we couldn’t leave without venturing to the top of the island first to see Sostis’ garden, plus he’d asked us to water his goats, and having seen one of them dead and decomposing in a bush earlier that day we felt obliged to help.

We passed the hot springs, poking our heads into a building that housed some sickly-looking chickens; along the side of this was a hand-painted sign: “Sostis Saves Souls. Healing massages” and a phone number.

The ‘path’ to the top was almost impossible to decipher and took a bit of navigating and determination, but we were rewarded at the peak with a heart-wrenchingly beautiful panorama of the entire Santorini caldera. We stood there with our heads to the wind soaking it all in, feeling as though we were truly on a deserted island, and we could see the lure it held.

We hopped across a huge chasm that had appeared in the rock, trying to ignore the bottomless drop below, and managed to find not just the garden (composed of a single olive tree, a handful of lime trees in wooden crates and a network of prickly pear cactus) but also Sostis’ first house, even smaller than the second, where he had originally lived during his first year on the island.  It looked barely big enough to hold a single bed, but we could see a handful of books and candles on a shelf inside, and a hand-built pig pen which also encompassed a chicken coop round the side.

We wondered what those first few weeks and months must’ve felt like, living an isolated and solitary life atop your own private island, hidden yet in full view of the world around you. If we could just about empathise with this idea, it was impossible still to imagine a lifetime of seclusion with nothing but passing sailors and animals for company; it was bound to take a toll on your mental health in one way or another.

But the isolation was as damning as it was freeing, and I remember thinking it takes a special kind of person to seek out and withstand such extremes.

We said goodbye to Sostis, who waved a white handkerchief as we boarded our boat and set sail. We never found out where to water his goats, but I did deliver my answer to his semi-rhetorical question before we departed:

“Love does not make people better. You cannot rely on love to make you a better person, because if you do not first love yourself, then you cannot love another.”

N.B. When we spoke to the Greek fixer some days later, she told us that Sostis was still phoning her every morning for a chat. He seemed to have developed a bit of a crush.

This is an excerpt from an ongoing project documenting the lives of people living in some of the most remote regions of Europe.

This project is the collective work of Ben Fuery and Lucy Pinnell. For inquiries, please email contact@lbjournals.com.