Ermoupoli & Ano Syros

Nothing prepares you for the arrival. The ferry comes round the headland and Ermoupoli rises out of the water in tiers of neoclassical facades, marble streets and two hills crowned by two cathedrals — one Orthodox, one Catholic. This is not a village that grew; it is a nineteenth-century city, built from nothing in the 1820s by refugees from Chios and Psara during the War of Independence, and for several decades the busiest port in Greece, ahead of Piraeus.

Miaouli Square, a vast marble plateia with the town hall across one end, is where the whole city walks in the evening. A few steps away is the Apollon Theatre, built in 1862–64 to designs by the Italian architect Pietro Sampò and opened with Rigoletto — a full horseshoe opera house, tier on tier, in a town of this size. North of the square the Vaporia quarter drops straight into the sea: captains' houses, and the blue-domed church of Agios Nikolaos above the rocks where people swim off ladders.

Uphill to the west, Ano Syros is the medieval town the Venetians founded in the thirteenth century, reached by around a thousand marble steps, Catholic to this day and topped by the cathedral of Saint George; the rebetiko musician Markos Vamvakaris was born in its lanes and is remembered there. Because 21,000 people live here all year, the bakeries are open in February and nothing is seasonal theatre — which is why Syros is one of the few Greek islands worth visiting in October, March or at Easter.