Travel Guide Anticythere

Located halfway between Kythera (2 hours by ferry) and Crete, this small island (20 km2 long) has just 80 inhabitants, concentrated in the port of Potamos. There's a school (half a dozen pupils), two tavernas and a handful of rudimentary rooms opened by the municipality during the summer. Just 1.5 km away, you can visit the ruins of the ancient city of Aigila and swim at Xeropotamos, Kamarella and Halara. A haven par excellence for pirates since the 4th century BC, this rock is still subject to the whims of the wind. Countless ships have been swallowed up by the foaming waves that break on its shores. It was from such a shipwreck that the famous Ephebe of Antikythera was rescued. It was here, too, that the "enigma of Antikythera" was solved. In 1901, a group of fishermen discovered a strange clock in the wreck of an ancient ship that had run aground off the coast of Antikythera. Known as the "Antikythera mechanism", this machine, with its twenty or so cogwheels, remained an enigma for scientists for almost a century. "Finding something like this is like finding a jet plane in Tutankhamen's tomb," explains one British researcher. Built in Rhodes in 86 B.C. to study the solar and lunar cycles, this insanely complex machine still hasn't revealed all its secrets. Now on display at the Museum of Maritime Archaeology in Athens, it is considered to be mankind's first computer.