Greece
Skyros
Wild Skyrian ponies roam the southern hills of an island where Carnival masks hide ancient rites.
The ponies stand on the southern ridge — small, dark-maned, and ancient, fewer than two hundred left in the world. At Carnival, men in sheepskin masks and goat bells stomp through the village in rites that anthropologists trace to pre-Christian fertility ceremonies. Skyros is Greece at its most unexpected.
The Skyrian horse is one of the rarest breeds in the world, with fewer than 200 individuals remaining, all on the southern half of the island. The breed is believed to be related to the horses depicted on the Parthenon frieze. The Skyros Carnival features men wearing sheepskin masks and goat bells in rituals that anthropologists interpret as pre-Christian ceremonies with no modern equivalent in Greece. Rupert Brooke, the World War I poet, is buried in an olive grove on the southern coast — he died on a hospital ship en route to Gallipoli in 1915. The island divides into a fertile, forested north and a bare, rocky south where the ponies roam.
Solo
The Carnival masks, the ponies on the southern ridge, and Rupert Brooke's grave in the olive grove — three entirely different experiences on one island.
Couple
Watching the ponies at dusk from the southern tracks, the Chora's labyrinthine lanes and rooftop terraces, and lobster baked with cheese at a village taverna.
- Meeting a Skyrian pony on the southern ridge is meeting a breed with fewer than two hundred left anywhere.
- At Carnival the goat-bell dancers take the lanes — you hear them before you see them.
- Rupert Brooke's olive-grove grave gives the island's south a pilgrim's footnote.
- Chora stacks white above the sands at Magazia, a Byzantine kastro on its crown.
Astakomakaronada — lobster spaghetti — is the island's speciality; Stefanos at Magazia is famous for it.
Skyrian goat cheese crumbles over wild greens picked from the same hillsides the ponies graze.
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