Travel: Enchanting Greek island of Astypalea plays host to a magical story spanning decades

If ever there was a place to inspire an artist, it’s Astypalea, a small Greek island on the sweet spot where the Dodecanese Islands meet the Cyclades in the south east of the Aegean Sea.

With a population of around 1300, which expands to 70,000 in high summer, it’s known as ‘the butterfly island’ because of its unusual shape. Like two outstretched wings.

Roughly comparable in size to the island of Bute on Scotland’s west coast, Astypalea is closer to the coast of Turkey than the Greek capital of Athens. Its largest settlement is the picture postcard hilltop village of Chora, famous for its sugar cube-like white buildings cascading down Bougainvillea-filled slopes to the port of Pera Gialos below.

At Chora’s peak sits the emblematic, if ruinous, Querini Castle, built by a Venetian nobleman in the early 1400s. It was hit by an earthquake in 1956, but visitors can still climb up to it and be rewarded with stunning views down to the port and out to endless blue waters of the Aegean.

In 1994, when tourism was in its infancy on Astypalea, award-winning Scottish painter, Charles Jamieson, travelled there with his wife Sally in search of inspiration. Charles, also an actor who spent six years in the 1980s playing Ruari Galbraith in popular Scottish soap, Take The High Road, found subject matter aplenty on Astypalea.

The red-haired Scotsman became a familiar sight sketching by the roadside and taking photographs which would become paintings when he returned home to Scotland.

One day, while walking on a back road near the seaside village of Livadi with Winston, a Londoner he’d met on the long ferry journey from Athens to Astypalea, the two men were invited to partake of a refreshment by local farmers, Michael and Maria Palatianos. The couple had their daughter Evdokia and her two children, Maria and John, staying with them for the summer from Athens.

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“At that point, Astypalea had relatively few tourists and islanders would invite tourists into their homes,” says Charles. “We spent a lovely afternoon in their orchard, where we were plied with fresh apricots, melon and all manner of sweet treats, washed down by great coffee.” The couple’s 10-year-old granddaughter, Maria, did all the translating.

Charles explains: “The hospitality was so warm and the family so friendly that a few days later, Winston and I returned with presents. Maria translated again and, as we were leaving, she tugged my shirt sleeve and asked if she could write to me to improve her English. How could I refuse this earnest little girl?”

Maria and Charles ended up as unlikely pen friends, writing back and forth between Athens and Ayrshire. For both, it was a window into another world. Maria wrote about her life at school and then at university. Charles would tell her about his painting and exhibitions he was in, sending art materials and programmes from plays. It fostered a fascination with the arts which stayed with Maria.

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“I expected our letters to stop once Maria became a teenager,” he tells me. “But that didn’t happen.”

As the years passed, with Maria making her way in the world of shipping insurance, the pair began to communicate digitally. In 2011, Charles and Sally travelled to Greece again, stopping off in Athens, where they met up for a big Greek home-cooked dinner with Maria and her family, including parents Evdokia and Nikos, and Maria’s best friend Carolina Alkalai.

In 2014, Charles received an email from Maria saying she had bought a hotel on Astypalea. It was to be called the Kallichoron Art Boutique Hotel. The unique selling point, she told him, was the famous hospitality he had experienced during his visit in 1994. Public areas and bedrooms of the hotel would all feature original artwork; another nod to his influence.

“I was so pleased and proud of Maria and wanted to do something to mark this exciting step in her life,” Charles says. “I remembered a painting I’d done of an older man on a donkey in Astypalea which I’d sold 20 years earlier. I made a card from a digital file and posted it.

“Days later, Maria emailed saying her mother was in tears as the painting was of her father, who had died a few years earlier. She wanted to know if I had the original.” The painting had sold in the late 1990s, but Charles managed to make a high-quality print which now has pride of place in the reception area at Kallichoron.

Charles and Sally returned to Astypalea in 2018 and it was an emotional trip for all. The Jamiesons were invited back to the family’s farm outside Livadi to meet Maria’s grandma for the first time in 24 years. There were, of course, plenty of refreshments…

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Maria and Carolina, her best friend and business partner in Kallichoron, drove the couple around the island, giving Charles fresh ideas for new paintings almost a quarter of a century after his first visit. Today, one-off prints of paintings Charles made after this trip adorn Kallichoron’s Signature Villa in Chora and across the hotel.

Now a successful businesswoman with her own Athens-based marine insurance company, as well as the hotel in Astypalea, Maria Mavroudi describes her unlikely friendship with the Scottish painter as life-enhancing and “so so special”.

“It’s strange the paths life can take you on,” she told me while multi-tasking as a barista at her latest venture on the island, Bokan coffee house, next door to Kallichoron’s Signature Villa. “As a little girl, it opened my eyes to other worlds. I used to love hearing about Charlie’s life as an artist and actor. It fired my imagination and opened up life beyond Greece. When I bought the hotel 10 years ago, it felt important to make the connection to two special visitors who became life long family friends. Their friendship means the world to me and my family.”

Maria’s grandmother died a few months ago. A well-known farmer and door-to-door fruit and vegetable seller on the island, her spirit lives on through her granddaughter and in Kallichoron’s extra-special Grandma’s Breakfast. A reminder of the hospitality this gracious Greek lady extended to Charles and his friend all these years ago.

Visit charlesjamieson.co.uk

Factfile

Astypalea can be reached by a small airport on the island, with regular flights from Athens. Doubles from €110 B&B, (three-night minimum). For more information, visit here.