For a small island, Skyros carries an outsized share of myth. It was here, the legends say, that the hero Theseus met his end, hurled from a cliff by that same King Lycomedes. Centuries later the Athenian general Cimon conquered the island, claimed to have found the bones of Theseus, and carried them triumphantly home to Athens around 475 BC. The island sat on the grain route between Athens and the Black Sea, valuable enough to be fought over by Athenians, Macedonians, Venetians, and Ottomans in turn. The Venetians left behind a kastro, a hilltop castle above the white town of Chora, and a Byzantine monastery of Saint George still occupies the height. The island finally joined the modern Greek state in 1830.

In April 1915, a British troopship carrying the war poet Rupert Brooke anchored in the bay of Tris Boukes. Brooke never reached the Gallipoli landings he had sailed for. An infected mosquito bite turned to blood poisoning, and he died aboard a French hospital ship on 23 April, at twenty-seven. His fellow officers buried him that same night, by lantern light, in an olive grove on the island. Just weeks earlier his sonnet The Soldier had been read aloud from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral, with its now-famous opening: 'If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.' The poem proved a prophecy. His grave at Tris Boukes, the tomb later commissioned by his mother, is inscribed with those very lines.

Skyros breeds its own animal found almost nowhere else: the Skyrian pony, a tiny, ancient horse standing barely a meter at the shoulder, roaming the bare southern hills below Mount Kochila. The island's culture is just as distinct. Skyrian houses are famous for their dense carved woodwork and walls hung with imported ceramics, an interior style unlike anywhere else in Greece, and the traditional dress, the vraka, survives alongside it. The Faltaits Folklore Museum, founded in 1964, was among the first of its kind in the country. At carnival time the island erupts in the Apokries festival, when men strap heavy goat-bells around their waists and dance through the streets as the Geros, a clanging, masked figure half-shepherd and half-spirit, in a rite that feels older than any church.

Skyros has known catastrophe too. In the autumn of 1918, as the Spanish flu swept the world, it reached this island of roughly 3,200 people. The epidemic began on 27 October, and within thirty days it had infected nearly 2,000 islanders and killed around 1,000, nearly a third of everyone alive on Skyros. A local writer set down the horror in a rare chronicle published the following year. The forested north and the rocky, wind-scoured south still hold their beaches and their shipwrecks, and the ferry from Kymi, a vessel fittingly named Achilleas, still crosses the strait. But the memory of that month is part of the island too, a reminder that even a place wrapped in myth lives in unsparing time.