Tourlitis Lighthouse

A slim stone tower stands on a single sea-worn rock in the harbour of Chora, the main town of Andros, as if it had grown out of the stone. Steps cut into the rock lead up from the waterline to its door, and the whole outcrop is barely larger than the lighthouse it carries. The tower faces the ruined Venetian castle at the tip of the town's headland, about 200 metres away, and the pair have become the emblem of the island; few lighthouses anywhere sit so completely alone on their own pinnacle of rock.

The first light on Tourlitis was lit in 1897. During the Second World War, in 1943, the tower was flattened in a German air raid, and for decades afterwards only a plain iron framework marked the rock. Its return was a private act of remembrance: the shipowner Alexandros Goulandris and his wife Marietta funded a faithful reconstruction in memory of their daughter Violanta, with the civil engineers Vasilis Tsogkas and Xenia Chalikiopoulou carrying out the work. Built in pale natural stone with a white gallery and lantern, the new tower was completed in the mid-1990s and the light shone again in 1995.

The tower itself is modest, about seven metres high, but the rock lifts its lantern to some nineteen metres above the Aegean. The automated light shows two white flashes every fifteen seconds and carries about six nautical miles. In 2009 the Greek post office chose Tourlitis for one of the five stamps in its series on the lighthouses of Greece. Andros, the northernmost of the Cyclades, has a long seafaring tradition: after Greek independence it became one of the country's major shipping centres, which gives a lighthouse rebuilt by a shipowning family a particular local resonance.

Chora, also simply called Andros, is the island's main town and the seat of its municipality; its old quarter runs out along a headland towards the castle, which looks straight across the water to Tourlitis.

Getting there

The lighthouse stands in the harbour of Chora (Andros town) on the east coast of Andros. The island has no airport; ferries from Rafina, the Attica port on the eastern side of Athens, reach Gavrio on the island's west coast in one to two hours, and Chora is reached from Gavrio by road across the island. The nearest international gateway in practice is Athens International Airport (ATH). Mykonos Island National Airport (JMK) is about 58 km away in a straight line, but across open sea. The lighthouse is seen from the harbour front and the castle headland of Chora.