Kipos means garden, and that is literally where the name comes from. The coastal survey of 1885 gives this shore as the spiantsa of the Kipos, from a walled vegetable garden that stood above it, and the point beyond as the cape of the Kipos. It lies on the east coast between Loggos and Alati, on the stretch where the Read more...

Glyfada means brackish, and on Paxos the name always points to the same thing: sulphur water coming up through the rock. There is more than one Glyfada on the island for exactly that reason. This one, on the east coast between Monodendri and Loggos, is the important one. The island’s own writer counts it among the three sulphur springs that Read more...

Arkoydaki is on the north east shore below Lakka, and what makes it unusual on this island is water. The survey of 1885 records that here, right at the shore, water flowed into a small vaulted chamber, already ruined by then, with maidenhair fern growing in it. The water was called excellent, and the detail that matters is this: it Read more...

Boyrsanas is on the northern peninsula of Lakka, near the chapel of Agios Thomas and the beacon, a few minutes beyond Charami. Some people call it Missorachi, and that name has history behind it. When the coast of the Lakka harbour was surveyed in 1885 the boat tour of the bay began from a place called Missorachi, and the cape Read more...

Charami is one of the very few sandy beaches on Paxos. The island’s own writer lists it as such, in a list where almost everything else is shingle. The 1885 survey of this coast gives it as sto Charami to Gouli, and describes a wide olive planted valley coming down to a shingle shore, with walls built of projecting stones. Read more...

Nerandou sits on the west coast below the great earthen cliffs of Fanariotatika, past the headland the old accounts call the Prasses cliff, where the shore turns to coarse sand. Two things were noted here in 1885 and both are still true. Water drips from the rock onto the beach. And there are great fallen blocks lying half drowned in Read more...

Avlaki of Vlachopoulatika is on the west coast, north of the Avlaki inlet proper and not to be confused with it. These are two different beaches. Getting here is the whole story. There is no road. You come by sea, or you take the path down from Vlachopoulatika, and that path is hard work: it drops over rock and through Read more...

Achai is on the wild west coast, and people do not come here for the beach. They come for what is beside it. The sea caves of Achai run one into the next. The largest of them was called the Achandakas, and the man who surveyed this coast in 1885 did not hold back: he called it one of the Read more...

Ballos is the short pebble beach near the southern end of the island, just before the coast turns into the bay of Porto Spuzzo, the sulphurous harbour of Ozias. It has a wreck story attached to it, recorded on the spot in 1885. A ship from Livorno, loaded with marble, was lost here, and the account says plainly that it Read more...

Aftia Gaidarou means the donkey’s ears, and for once the name explains itself the moment you see it. Two rocks stand off the point, and the coastal survey of 1885 says exactly that: the cape of the donkey’s ears, from two reefs shaped like a donkey’s ears. It sits on the south coast between Soulanena and Ballos, on the run Read more...

Soulanena is one of the string of small pebble coves between Gaios and Ozias, and it keeps the same name it had in 1885, when the coastal survey recorded the spiantsa of Soulanena among the capes and kilns of this shore. The names along here are all like that: somebody’s vineyard, somebody’s almond trees, somebody’s beach. Just before Soulanena the Read more...

Giannas is the first stretch of shore south of Gaios, and the only one on this coast that the old road actually reached. In 1885 the fourth of the island’s roads ran along the sea as far as Giannas, and there was talk of carrying it on to the harbour of Ozias. The talk took a century to become fact. Read more...

Melisi is just outside Gaios, under the long slope that falls from the old fortress on the islet of Agios Nikolaos. The 1885 survey of the harbour calls the point here the cape of Melissi and the shore below it the spiantsa sto Melissi, spiantsa being the local word for a beach of rounded stones. Two things were noted here Read more...

Kamini is the first beach you reach going north out of Gaios, and the busiest of this stretch of coast. Its name is industrial, not poetic: kamini means kiln, and in 1885 the lime kiln that gave it the name was already half ruined on the shore. It was known then as the kiln of Papa Menigos. Lime burning was Read more...

Kloni Ghouli is the quieter of the two coves on this short stretch, the one you reach second coming north from Gaios, immediately beyond Kamini. In the coastal survey of 1885 it appears exactly where it is, written Kloni to Gouli, between the upper cape of Kaki Lagada and the kiln that gave Kamini its name. There is a small Read more...

This small shore on the east coast, between Pnigmeni and Kaki Lagada, is where the rock is pierced. A visitor of the 1880s, working his way along this coast by boat, noted rounded stones lying inside two small low caves, and said the formation looked like a bridge that had been built there. Tripitos means pierced, and that is almost Read more...

Pnigmeni is the cove between Alati and Kaki Lagada, on the stretch of east coast where the cliffs come down steeply and the path has to pick its way. The name means the drowned woman. The nineteenth century accounts of this coast are unusually detailed, naming every reef and every kiln, yet none of them records it. The name appears Read more...

Alati lies at the foot of the valley of the same name, on the east coast between Loggos and Gaios. A visitor of the 1880s described it in two strokes: whitish rock, and sand of the very finest. Above it, at the top of the cliff to the south east, there is something nobody has explained. A deep rectangular cut Read more...

Rodovani is on the wild west side of Antipaxos, below high white cliffs, and it is as empty today as the old books describe it. It too was once a loading point for the island’s stone, and there were two rows of quarries here. Its mark is the islet of Rodovani standing off the shore, white cliffed and steep. You Read more...

Sarakiniko is the bay at the southern end of Antipaxos, and in the nineteenth century it was a working place. It was one of the four points on this island from which stone was shipped out: Kalamitsa, Sarakiniko, Rodovani and the main harbour. The slabs and marble of Antipaxos went from here to Corfu, Parga, Preveza and Patras. The old Read more...

Skidhi is one of the three beaches that the island’s own writers list as the pebbled and deserted ones, together with Rodovani and Sarakiniko. It has not changed category since. Behind the shore the ground opens into a shallow basin, and in 1885 that basin held about a dozen crescent shaped terraces where wheat and oats were grown. Antipaxos was Read more...

Mikro Agni is the southern and tighter of the two Agni coves, a pocket in the rock below Arvanitika. In 1885 it was called Epano Agni, Upper Agni, and its neighbour to the north Kato Agni. What was noted of it then still describes it: fine rounded stones, no sand. The headland between the two coves is Mesi, the Middle, Read more...

Megalo Agni is the northern of the two Agni coves on the east coast of Antipaxos, and the wider of the pair. In 1885 the same beach was called Kato Agni, Lower Agni, and the one below it Epano Agni, Upper Agni. The names have swapped system since: today they go by size, then they went by position. It is Read more...

Plaka is the beach on the west side of the cape of the same name, between Voutoumi and the harbour. On the older maps it is written with a double kappa, Plakka, and that spelling survives on the path signs. It is a narrow shore of rounded stones under strong twisting rock. A visitor of the 1880s noted something odd Read more...

Mesovrika lies next to Vrika, behind the round rise the old maps call Misorachi. Same water, a completely different beach: white pebbles instead of sand, in the water and out of it, and nothing built at all. No sunbeds, no bar, no shade. That is both its advantage and its drawback. With small children the pebbles are hard work. Without Read more...

Vrika is the beach you see in every photograph of Antipaxos: fine white sand and water that keeps its colour down to seven metres, where you can still make out the sand below with no weed on it. It was not always a beach for swimmers. In 1885 it was called Katovrika, and stone was loaded here. Antipaxos quarried slabs Read more...

Agia Paraskevi is the church of Zenempisatika, a village of seventeen families in the survey of 1885, which belonged to the district of Vellianitatika. At the foot of its porch sits a stone cut with the year 1700, which puts it among the oldest dated churches on Paxos. The bell gable is a double arch carrying two bells, with an Read more...

A church at Bogdanatika, above Gaios, a little under two hundred metres from Agia Paraskevi. We are recording it under the name the open map data gives it, the Panagia, because we have not been able to confirm a fuller name on the ground. There is a good chance that this is the chapel of the Panagia of Koutroubalis, which Read more...

A church above Loggos, a little inland from the harbour. We record it as the Zoodochos Pigi, the Life-Giving Spring, and the reasoning is worth stating. The Zoodochos Pigi of Loggos is known from the old accounts as a dependency of the Ypapanti: after Easter the icon came down from Grammatikeika to Lakka, then on the Friday of the Life-Giving Read more...

A small church above the harbour of Lakka, reached by a flight of twenty-five steps. The climb is the point: from the top you look straight out through the mouth of the bay. In the survey of 1885 the harbour of Lakka, then five people, is listed with two churches, Agios Ioannis and Agios Andreas, this one and the parish Read more...

Agios Andreas is the parish church of Lakka, and by local tradition the oldest church on Paxos. A visitor who recorded it in the 1880s was told exactly that, and noted two details on the front: a stone shaped like a cannon set into the facade, and two carved fish, because, as they told him, the saint was a fisherman. Read more...

A small church on the rocks at the northern edge of Gaios, by the old quarantine station. A visitor in the 1880s called it the most picturesque thing on that shore: set directly on the rock, with a portico of four columns and wall paintings on the iconostasis. It is a private chapel of the Kouvas family, and it is Read more...

The Holy Trinity is the parish church of Gaios and the largest church in the town. It was the new church. In the 1880s it was still unfinished: a visitor of the time calls it the newest and biggest of Gaios and notes its bell tower painted white and blue, and it was built to take over from the Ascension Read more...

Another of the churches of Agios Spiridon, in the centre of the island between Gaios and Magazia. The old registers list churches of this saint at Kokkinatika, dated 1793, and at Mitsialatika in Magazia, dated 1844, besides the ones at Argyratika and on Kaltsonisi. We have not yet established which of those entries belongs to this building. If you know Read more...

A church of Agios Spiridon above Gaios, in the Vlachopoulatika district, not far from the Eleousa and from Agios Charalambos. Agios Spiridon is the patron of Corfu, and Paxos, which was administered from Corfu for most of its history, took him up with enthusiasm: there are churches of his at Argyratika, at Kokkinatika, at Mitsialatika in Magazia and on the Read more...

A church of the Entry of the Virgin into the Temple, above Gaios. The same dedication appears inside the Eleousa at Vlachopoulatika, where the right-hand altar is given to the Eisodia, a reminder that on Paxos a feast could have both its own church and a side altar elsewhere, depending on which family wanted it. Feast day: 21 November. Read more...

Agios Georgios stands on a raised circular paved terrace at Vellianitatika, and its tall campanile stands apart from the church, which is unusual on Paxos. The large side door is worked in what a nineteenth century visitor called the manner of the Renaissance. Inside there is a wooden ceiling, a raised presbytery behind a wooden rail, and a double galleried Read more...

Agios Demetrios is the church of Linaratika, above Gaios. In the survey of 1885 the hamlet, then six people, is listed under his name. Linaratika was a quarrying village. A visitor of that time describes nine houses on the edge of a high hill above the valley of Stefos, where the men cut angular blocks and flagstones and carried them Read more...

Agios Ioannis at Bastatika is known as the Agios Ioannis of the Oregano, for the hillside it stands on. The reason to walk up is the view. From here the whole southern half of Paxos opens out, with Antipaxos beyond it, one of the widest prospects on the island, and quite different from the sunset viewpoints of the west coast, Read more...