Gialos, the painted harbour of Symi

Symi town is really two places joined by a staircase. Gialos is the harbour, Chorio is the old town on the hill above it, and the Kali Strata, the 'good street' of wide stone steps, links the two. For centuries people lived up the hill, away from pirates. When the seas became safer in the 18th and 19th centuries, the town spilled down to the water.

The wealth that built Gialos came from the sea floor and the slipways. Symiot divers worked the sponge beds across the eastern Mediterranean, and Symiot shipwrights built fast wooden boats in the yards of Harani, on the north side of the harbour. In the 19th century the island prospered, and families built the mansions you see today, with tiled roofs, pediments over the windows and ceilings painted inside.

Then the trade fell away. Under Italian rule from 1912, the island lost its markets on the nearby coast, the sponge fleets dwindled and many families left for Rhodes, Athens, Egypt, America and Australia. The Second World War left houses in ruins. For decades Gialos was half empty, its grand houses roofless. Since the 1970s many have been restored, and the island has strict rules to keep the colours and the shapes as they were.

The harbour still carries its history in plain sight. The clock tower at the entrance dates from 1881. Shops sell natural sponges cut and cleaned on the island. The Nautical Museum, in an old house just back from the water, tells the story of the divers and the boatbuilders. And on the waterfront a marble plaque marks the building where, on 8 May 1945, the German forces in the Dodecanese signed their surrender to the Allies.