For ancient Athens, Zakynthos was less a romantic destination than a strategic resource. The island held a lake — modern Lake Keri — whose bottom oozed natural tar. Athenian sailors dredged it up using myrtle branches tied to poles, collecting it in pots to swab directly onto trireme hulls: a more effective preservative than pitch, resistant to the teredo worms that devoured Mediterranean warships. In exchange for this alliance and its useful tar, Athens sent warships when the Spartans raided the island in 430 BC. Even then the city held.

Over subsequent centuries, Macedonia seized it. Rome took it from Philip V in 191 BC. The Mithridatic general Archelaus tried and failed. The Slavic invasions that swept through mainland Greece in the 6th and 7th centuries appear to have left Zakynthos untouched — no Slavic place names survive on the island, a distinction few Greek territories share.

Venice took Zakynthos in 1484 and kept it until 1797 — over three hundred years. The mark of that era is everywhere: the urban grid, the loggia-style architecture, the literary culture that flourished when island poets had access to Venetian printing presses and the currents of European Romanticism. The Heptanese School of Literature emerged here, blending Italian and Greek traditions into something neither country claimed as entirely their own.

The most famous product of that school was Dionysios Solomos, born in Zakynthos in 1798. He wrote his "Hymn to Liberty" in 1823, during the Greek War of Independence. About forty years later, in 1865, the opening stanzas became the words of the Greek national anthem. His statue stands in the main square of Zakynthos town. A few streets away, a museum holds his manuscripts alongside those of Andreas Kalvos, another Zakynthian poet. The Italian poet Ugo Foscolo was also born here, in 1778, and never forgot it — his sonnet "A Zacinto" is a lament for an island he left and could not return to.

When German forces occupied Zakynthos during the Second World War, the island's Jewish community numbered around 275 people. In 1943, the German commander ordered the mayor, Loukas Karrer, and the Archbishop, Chrysostomos Bezes, to hand over a list of Jewish residents. The Archbishop reportedly presented the German commander with a list containing only two names: his own and the mayor's. The Jewish community was warned, hidden by Christian neighbors in the countryside, and survived the war entirely. Both the mayor and the Archbishop were later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem — among only a handful of Greek Christian officials to receive that honor.

On 12 August 1953, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the Ionian Islands. Zakynthos bore the worst of it. The shaking destroyed most buildings on the island — the Venetian-era campaniles, the old town's arcaded streets, generations of domestic architecture. Fires broke out afterward. The death toll across the Ionian Islands from the earthquake sequence ran into the hundreds.

What replaced the lost buildings was plainer, more seismically practical, and architecturally modest. The town was rebuilt from almost nothing. The churches that survived did so largely because they had already been shaken by earlier tremors and reinforced. What couldn't be rebuilt was exactly what the Venetians had called it: a flower, a layered, fragrant accumulation of history. What remained was the island itself — arrowhead-shaped, 40 kilometres long, edged with white limestone cliffs on the west and sandy beaches on the east, tilting into the Ionian Sea.

Zakynthos covers 405 square kilometres and holds about 40,000 people, a population that swells dramatically in summer. The Bay of Laganas on the southeast coast is the most important loggerhead sea turtle nesting area in the Mediterranean, protected within Greece's first national marine park. Charter flights arrive at Zakynthos International Airport (ICAO: LGZA) from across northern Europe.

Navagio Beach, accessible only by boat, draws the majority of the island's visitors: a stranded ship's hull rusting in a cove ringed by vertical white cliffs, the water an improbable shade of turquoise. The Blue Caves at Cape Skinari glow in a way that still surprises people who have seen photographs. Inland, olive groves and Zante currant vines cover the eastern plain — the currant is a small, seedless grape native to the island, exported since antiquity. Andreas Vesalius, the Renaissance anatomist who first accurately described the human body, died on Zakynthos in 1564 after being shipwrecked on a return pilgrimage from Jerusalem. His grave has never been found.