In 1207 the Venetian brothers Geremia and Andrea Ghisi seized Skiathos and built the Bourtzi on its little harbor islet - a fortlet styled after the more famous Bourtzi in Nafplio, meant to shield the capital from pirates. It did not work. Raiders kept coming, and by the mid-14th century the townspeople gave up on the coast entirely. They abandoned the ancient site and retreated to Kastro, a fortified rock on the island's northern tip, where they would stay walled up for nearly five hundred years. Only after the Greek War of Independence did the islanders trust the shore again, moving the capital back to its original spot - exactly where the town stands today. The Bourtzi remains, no longer a fortress but a leafy stage for concerts and a place to watch the harbor lights come on.

The sea around Skiathos has wrecked more than pirates' plans. In 480 BC, the fleet of the Persian king Xerxes was caught by a storm and smashed against these coastal rocks - a prelude to the Greek naval victories at Artemisium and, the following year, Salamis. The island joined the Delian League, then fell to Philip V of Macedon, who destroyed its city in 200 BC. Far later, the harbor found its calling in wood. Through the 19th century, Skiathos grew into one of the Aegean's important shipbuilding centers, its pine forests feeding the yards until the trees were nearly gone and steamboats made the sailing hulls obsolete. North of town, a small shipwright still works in the old way, shaping the curved timbers of traditional Greek caïques.

Two narrow streets back from the harbor stands a modest two-story stone house, and inside it Greece keeps the memory of Alexandros Papadiamantis. Born on Skiathos in 1851, he became one of the most beloved writers in the Greek language, a master of the short story whose work returned again and again to the island's chapels, fishermen, and feast days. His father built this house in 1860, and Papadiamantis lived and died on the island that fills his pages; he died here in 1911. The house is now a museum, its rooms holding his ink bottle, his coffer, his bed, and the small relics of a life lived close to the bone. To stand inside is to understand how completely a place can shape a writer, and a writer a place.

Modern Skiathos arrived by decision and runway. In 1964 the Greek National Tourism Organisation marked the island as a development zone, and the changes came fast: a coast road unspooling west toward the famous pine-backed beach at Koukounaries, the island's airport opening in 1972, and the first large hotels rising along the shore. Buses now run from Koukounaries to town every twenty minutes or so, and a few euros carry you the length of the island. Yet step off the waterfront into the back lanes and the older Skiathos is still there - churches around every corner, the smell of salt and grilled fish, and the harbor lights reflecting off black water at night, just as they have for centuries.