Ikaria has been a remote place for hundreds of years, a forgotten backwater island even for the politicians in Athens. And even if boats have travelled here from Piraeus for a long time it wasn’t until 1995 that Ikaria had an airport. It was built on the only part of the island that is reasonably flat, but it still needed a lot of landfill in the ocean to extend the strip enough for small propeller planes to land.Â
But elsewhere there’s nothing flat on Ikaria. An elongated island about 40 km x 9 km with a mountain ridge that with peaks over one thousand meters over sea level span from east to west. So most of the ground leans. Everywhere. All roads bend in endless serpentines. There is no such thing as a straight road.