What Is Skyros Known For?

Skyros holds the grave of an English war poet whose death here, far from any battlefield, became one of the most quietly mourned moments of the First World War.

Skyros is known first for Rupert Brooke, buried in an olive grove above Tris Boukes Bay in the island's south. Brooke died in 1915 aboard a French hospital ship anchored off Skyros, succumbing to blood poisoning after an infected mosquito bite while serving with the British forces, and his sonnet "The Soldier" had already made him one of the war's most recognized literary voices by the time of his death. A statue honoring him now stands in Chora's main square, and his grave remains a pilgrimage site for readers and literature enthusiasts who make the trip out to the remote southern coast to see it.

The island is equally known for the Skyrian pony, a rare breed found nowhere else on earth and believed to have arrived with Athenian settlers as early as the 8th century BC. Some historians connect the breed to the horses depicted in the Parthenon friezes, and with only a few hundred individuals left today, the pony now holds protected status, with a dedicated sanctuary farm south of Skyros Town working to preserve it.

Skyros carries older mythological ties too, since legend holds that Achilles hid here disguised as a girl to avoid being sent to the Trojan War, until Odysseus tricked him into revealing himself. Theseus, the hero who later killed the Minotaur on Crete, was also exiled to Skyros in his final years and, according to myth, died there after being thrown from a cliff by the island's king, Lykomedes, connecting Skyros to Skiathos and Alonissos across the wider Sporades.