Greece Discovery Guide

Greece is a mountainous peninsula and several thousand islands, and the two halves ask for different trips. The mainland holds Delphi, Meteora and the Peloponnese within a day's drive of each other, while the islands are reached by ferry from Attica's ports and change character from one archipelago to the next.

The main travel issue

It is concentration. Around three quarters of all visits fall between May and September, and they fall on the same places -- the Acropolis, the best-known Cyclades -- which is when the Aegean's summer north winds are also at their strongest.

The solution

Divide the calendar rather than the country. Take Athens, the Peloponnese and Epirus in spring or autumn, when the sites are open and the light is kinder. Give the islands the summer they are built for, choosing a group beyond the two everyone names.

• Attica
• Central Greece
• Central Macedonia
• Crete
• East Macedonia and Thrace
• Epirus
• Ionian Islands
• Mount Athos
• North Aegean
• Peloponnese
• South Aegean
• Thessaly
• West Greece
• West Macedonia

If you travel slowly

Choose one region and stay. A fortnight on Crete alone -- the largest island, with its own mountains, gorges and a coastline over a thousand kilometres long -- is a fuller trip than a week spent between ferries. On the mainland, Epirus rewards the same patience: the Vikos Gorge, deeper than it is wide, and stone villages that empty in the afternoon heat and fill again at dusk.

If you want to see the essentials

The Acropolis in Athens, then the mainland's two great set pieces: Delphi on the slopes of Parnassus and the monasteries of Meteora on their rock pillars in Thessaly, where six of an original twenty-four are still lived in. Add one island group -- the Cyclades are the postcard, the Ionian Islands the greener, Venetian-built alternative.

If you seek local character

Time a visit to a name day or to Orthodox Easter, the calendar around which family life still turns, and eat where the menu is handwritten and short. In Thessaloniki the Byzantine churches sit inside a working, unhurried city; in the North Aegean, islands such as Lesvos and Chios are large enough to have kept an economy that is not tourism.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

East Macedonia and Thrace holds Philippi and the Dadia forest, where four species of vulture nest; West Greece has Olympia and the Messolonghi lagoons and few coaches. Mount Athos is a monastic republic rather than a sight, entered on its own terms, and is better read about than attempted on a whim.

Two things shape the texture of daily life more than any monument: the Orthodox Church, to which somewhere between eight and nine in ten Greeks belong, and the family. The year runs on the church calendar -- Easter above all, celebrated by the Orthodox reckoning -- and on name days, which a Greek marks much as others mark a birthday. Children are still, by long custom, named after a grandparent, which is why the same handful of names recurs in every village.

The language is the other continuity. Greek has been written in its own alphabet for roughly 2,800 years, and a visitor who learns the letters can read station names, menus and gravestones alike. The music a traveller most often meets is rebetiko, the urban song of the ports and the refugee quarters, listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage and still played live in Athens and Piraeus.

Greece is also a country that carries its recent history close to the surface. The population exchange of 1923 brought 1.3 million people from Asia Minor; the civil war, the dictatorship of 1967 to 1974 and the debt crisis after 2010 are within living memory, and politics is discussed in cafés with a directness visitors sometimes mistake for anger. It is not.

The pressure is uneven. Around three quarters of visits arrive between May and September, most of them on the same islands and the same three or four sites, while whole regions of the mainland see few visitors in any month. The single most useful thing a traveller can do is spend part of the trip somewhere else -- Epirus, West Greece, Thrace -- where the money is needed and the welcome is unforced.

The sea turtles of Zakynthos nest on the beaches of Laganas Bay, the first area in the Mediterranean to be made a national park for their protection and, at Sekania, among the densest loggerhead nesting grounds anywhere. The park's rules on the nesting beaches exist for the eggs and hatchlings; follow them, and choose a beach outside the bay for an evening swim.

The Mediterranean monk seal survives in Greek waters in the low hundreds, with its largest gathering on the island of Gyaros and a marine park around Alonissos and the Northern Sporades. Boats that keep their distance from caves and coves are the protection that matters.

On Mount Athos and at working monasteries such as Meteora, these are homes and places of prayer before they are sights. Dress covers shoulders and knees, voices drop, and a closed door is closed.

January–February -- Athens for the museums and the Acropolis without a queue; winters are wet rather than cold at sea level, and snow rarely lasts except on north-facing slopes. The mountains of Epirus and Thessaly are the winter destinations.

March–April -- the Peloponnese and Delphi in green, before the heat; Orthodox Easter, which falls on its own calendar, is the moment to be in any village, with Crete and the mainland ahead of the islands, where much is still shuttered.

May–June -- the islands open and the sea warms; the Ionian Islands and Crete before the school holidays, and Meteora while the days are long but not yet fierce.

July–August -- peak everywhere, and the season the summer north winds blow hardest through the Aegean, strongest in the afternoons and sometimes for days. Sailors plan around them; ferry passengers should expect a rough crossing now and then. Choose the North Aegean or the mainland's mountains over the best-known Cyclades; Athens is at its hottest and emptiest of residents.

September–October -- the best months for most of the country: the sea still warm, the winds easing, the crowds thinning after mid-September. The Cyclades reward this window above any other.

November–December -- Thessaloniki and Athens for city trips; island ferries thin out and many island businesses close for the winter, so plan the islands for another time.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average

Highest — the best-known Cyclades in season

Higher — Athens' centre, the Ionian resorts, Crete's north-coast resorts

Average — Thessaloniki, the larger Aegean islands, the Peloponnese coast

Lower — Epirus, Thessaly and the mountain north, Thrace, inland Crete

Athens fares checked against OASA's own price list; the relative bands are editorial judgment.