On 12 August 1953, an earthquake devastated the Ionian Islands. Argostoli, Lixouri, Sami — virtually every major settlement on Cephalonia was damaged or destroyed. Fiskardo, on the island's northernmost tip, survived almost untouched. No one is entirely sure why: perhaps its geology, perhaps its distance from the epicentre, perhaps simple luck. The result is that Fiskardo preserves what most of Cephalonia lost — its original Venetian and neoclassical architecture, the painted facades and the arched doorways and the proportions of an earlier century. For visitors who want to see what the island looked like before 1953, Fiskardo is the only place to look.

Fiskardo sits above layers of history it barely knew existed. The village had already been identified with the ancient town of Panormos, mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century BC. Then in 2005, construction workers building a shopping complex near the harbour discovered a stone plaque from ancient Greece — a thank-you note, essentially, from the people of Athens to the people of Panormos for allowing them to hunt in the area. A year later, in 2006, builders digging a hotel foundation uncovered something far more significant: a perfectly preserved Roman-era grave complex measuring 6.1 by 7.9 metres, containing five burial sites. Inside were gold earrings and rings, gold leaves that may have adorned ceremonial clothing, glass and clay pots, bronze artefacts decorated with masks, and a bronze lock. The Greek Culture Ministry called the find unique — nothing like it, they said, had ever been discovered on any Ionian island. The 2,000-year-old door still swung open on its stone pivots.

The Norman who gave the village its name was not a minor figure. Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and Calabria, was among the most formidable military commanders of the eleventh century — the man whose campaigns in southern Italy and Sicily fundamentally reshaped the Mediterranean world. He died at Atheras beach in 1085, reportedly from fever, while on campaign in the region. The Frankish period of Greek history took its name in part from men like him, and the village that now carries his memory is as improbably lovely a memorial as any conqueror could hope for: a horseshoe harbour lined with restaurants, the water in the bay turning deep green in the afternoons, the hills behind covered in dense forest protected under Greek law.

Nikos Kavvadias, the Greek poet and writer born in 1910 and dead in 1975, lived for a time in Fiskardo. He is best known for his sea poetry — verse drawn from years working as a radio operator on merchant ships, poems saturated with port towns and long voyages and the peculiar loneliness of men who spend their lives at sea. That he chose Fiskardo, the northernmost harbour of Cephalonia with its ferry connections to Ithaca and Lefkada, as a place to live seems fitting. By the eighteenth century the port had become the commercial harbour of Erisos, the surrounding municipal region, and something of its mercantile and maritime atmosphere has persisted. A small fishing fleet still operates out of the village, though it has been diminishing for years.

Fiskardo sits at the end of a two-kilometre bay of the same name, its rocky coast giving way inland to dense forested hills that are under legal protection as a landscape of great natural beauty. The ferry to Frikes on Ithaca leaves from here, connecting two islands with deep literary associations in a twenty-minute crossing. In recent years the village has developed a small luxury tourism economy — villas on the surrounding hillsides, yachts in the harbour, restaurant tables on the waterfront — while maintaining an architectural coherence that most of the island sacrificed to the 1953 disaster. The Roman theatre discovered nearby, with its stone seat-backs still in place, remains partly excavated. There is always more Fiskardo to discover.