When the Meltemi Blows
On the dry north wind of the Aegean summer, the rhythm it sets, and learning to let the weather decide the day on Skyros.
Some mornings in high summer you wake and know, before you open the shutters, that the meltemi has arrived. The light is sharper. The air is dry and clean. And the sea, which yesterday lay flat as poured glass, has turned a restless, brilliant blue, combed white at the edges.
The meltemi is the north wind of the Aegean, and for a few days at a time in July and August it rules the islands. On the famous, exposed ones it can be a nuisance. On Skyros, with its sheltered eastern beaches, it is mostly a gift: it cools the heat, scrubs the haze from the air, and sends the windsurfers racing across the southern bay at Kalamitsa.
Letting the wind decide
The trick is not to fight it. On a meltemi day you don’t go to the open beach you’d planned; you go to the sheltered cove below Chora, or up into the lanes where the white walls break the gusts, or you simply stay put with a book and let the canvas crack overhead. The wind decides, and you follow. There is a freedom in that, in handing the day’s plan to the weather and seeing where it takes you.
By evening it often softens. The sea lies down again. The tavernas fill. And the night is the clearest you will see all year, every star out, the Milky Way spilled across the dark, because the same wind that ruffled the water has swept the sky clean.
The rhythm of it
You learn, after a few days, to read the wind the way the islanders do, and to plan loosely enough that it never spoils anything. It is one more way Skyros teaches the same lesson: hold your plans lightly, and the island will give you better ones.
If you want to ride it rather than shelter from it, the southern bay is the place: see Kalamitsa and windsurfing. And for when each wind is most likely, our month-by-month guide will help.
More from the Journal soon. To plan around the seasons, start here.