The (Almost) Deserted Greek Island With Europe’s Most Remote Hot Springs
The only thing cooler than being sailed to visit a far-flung island in the most Southern corner of Europe is being sailed to an uninhabited island off the coast of this island to visit what is probably Europe’s most remote hot spring. For free.
In case you didn’t already know how we ended up on Santorini island with our van in the summer of 2021, it was to film the final scenes of a two-part TV series on Europe’s Hidden Hot Springs for Japanese TV. Our producer had proposed the idea of taking our van to this most distant corner of Europe to capture footage of us waving goodbye to the symbolic Santorinian sunset at the end of our journey; naturally, we agreed. Not only did it involve hot springs, but it was also arranged that we would meet a hermit who had lived alone on the otherwise uninhabited island for 40 years. We couldn’t wait.
We’d arrived on Santorini several days before the filming was scheduled to take place, which was lucky as we had to wait for the wind to change direction before we could sail. The day before the journey we visited Gialos, the old port of Thira, where we were told we’d be meeting the owner of a cave restaurant. We took the cable car down from Thira which I found terrifying and Ben found hilarious as he rocked the vessel side to side while we descended several hundred metres down a vertical cliff face. The alternative was to either walk down the 587 cobbled steps, or ride a donkey. This was the traditional method of transporting goods and people on the island, yet somehow the line of sad, hot donkeys dressed in garish headbands standing in in their own muck didn’t really match up to this ideal.
We wandered around the small port area of restaurants and gift shops with camera crew in tow, and through the chambers of the little market whose walls were lined with souvenir towels featuring depictions of sexual acts that were popular in Ancient Greece. We stopped to buy some postcards and, despite his best efforts to be discreet, everyone was watching as the cameraman purchased a large wooden penis and quickly stuffed it into his bag. (N.B. You’ll see these symbols everywhere in Greece and Santorini in particular; they’re a tribute to Dionysus, the God of fertility, conveniently merged with a bottle opener to double their effectiveness).
Wandering around the narrow cobbled streets we were eventually approached by a friendly restaurant owner who invited us to sit down and have a drink of ouzo (and a mastika “for the lady”). His name was Nikolas, and he turned out to be quite the character, a proud Santorinian and fisherman who, uncannily, knew Sostis, the hermit we were due to meet tomorrow, from many years back. He was charming and eccentric and made perfect interview footage- we couldn’t believe our luck. Except, roughly two hours into our chance encounter, we were informed by the producer that this was the cave restaurant owner we were due to meet after all; and there was us thinking we’d done a great job as presenters. Doh!
Having taken his portrait and spent a while chatting with his lovely wife we quietly sidled off when Nikolas started chopping and preparing octopus (as lifelong vegetarians who’d recently watched My Octopus Teacher on Netflix the thought of being offered one to eat was making our stomachs churn).
The next day we took the earliest cable car back down to the port to meet our captain, who was waiting aboard a small boat made of beautifully polished wood. We were privileged to have our own private charter and not be lumped in with the shiploads of tourists headed to the same destination (more on them later).
Our boat journey would take us across the centre of the flooded caldera, around the edge of the large volcanic island of Nea Kameni (Greek for “new burnt island”) and over to Palea Kameni in the West (Greek for “old burnt island”). We often heard reference to the volcanic caldera during our time on Santorini but initially didn’t know what it meant.
Imagine one very large island with a volcano at the centre of it; this was known as Ancient Thera. Around 3,600 years ago this volcano erupted with such force that it blew a hole right through the centre of the island, submerging most of it underwater. The so-called 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 formed out of lava at the centre. It was this eruption that inspired the legend of Atlantis.
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.
These thermal springs were created by the still-active volcano which had erupted as recently as 1950, and this was responsible for creating Nea Kameni 425 years ago, and Palea Kameni around 2,000 years ago.
Eventually we began to approach the only dock on Palea Kameni, in which several boats were already moored, and by dock I mean a 2m² expanse of concrete outside of an impossibly tiny hut shaded by a sunbleached Nestlé umbrella.
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).
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We handed him a bag of fruit and a message that his old friend Nikolas said hello. It was at this point the cameraman had decided to put his camera down and start chatting, thereby missing the encounter. (“Can you just do it again?” he later asked, unaware of how a natural conversation works).
Sostis prepared us all coffees 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 that wasn’t his only sink. The camera crew eagerly filmed his every move, and in doing so we got a chance to 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 that tiny porch, while the producer 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.
“How does love make people better?” he asked at one point. I considered my answer carefully while Ben continued to probe, eventually giving up on our premeditated questions and beginning to ask Sostis more about his own line of thinking.
In fact, 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 relocate to the barren island of Palea Kameni) when the 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”.
As documentary-makers, this made our blood boil; sure, we weren’t getting what we wanted out of this encounter, but what about Sostis? Were his musings and motivations not of importance too?
Sostis was none the wiser about the exchange; he 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 Greek fixer who worked to quickly scrub them clean with hand sanitisier 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, boat after boat full of tourists was sailing into the tiny bay, and when they anchored dozens of loud tourists would jump into the sea screaming and then swim into the rust-coloured bay. Somehow the blaring sounds of cheesy Eurodance and EDM that were coming from the deck did not corroborate well with the idea of visiting a ‘remote island’ for TV, and our producer stood waving fruitlessly at the ships in an attempt to get them to turn the music down. No such luck, but it was entertaining to watch.
After lunch we made our own way round to the hot springs of Palea Kameni, which lay behind the island’s single church, below a building that housed sickly-looking chickens and next to a wreck which somewhat resembled a picnic area; along the side of this was a hand-painted sign: “Sostis Saves Souls. Healing massages” and a phone number.
We were reluctant to climb into the cloudy orange water which stained the rocks and evidently people’s swimwear too. It looked like the run-off from a tin mine back home in Cornwall, but this was the finale of the programme and we couldn’t let our producer down now. We picked our moment between shipments of tourists to climb over the rocky cliffs and in; quite honestly the idea of jumping off a boat and swimming in had terrified us, so we were pleased to take the wusses way in.
The water was lukewarm at best, and so cloudy you couldn’t see your own hands beneath the surface, which conjured all sorts of mental images about what could be lying on the bottom (sea urchins, jellyfish and seaweed scared me the most, but fortunately it seemed that the iron content of the water was too high to support any kind of life). But even so the thermal water was noticeably warmer than the blue Aegean Sea, and pleasant enough to float in when you found a warm patch.
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 the goats, and having seen one of them dead and decomposing in a bush earlier that day we felt obliged to help.
The ‘path’ 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.
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.