Two tiny uninhabited islets called Kalogeros sit at the dead center of the Aegean, closer to nothing than to anything. C...

Two tiny uninhabited islets called Kalogeros sit at the dead center of the Aegean, closer to nothing than to anything. Chios is 27 nautical miles to the east, Andros 23 to the southwest, and Skyros 46 to the north. They are among the most isolated pieces of Greek territory in the entire sea. The name itself comes from Aegean sailors who called solitary sea rocks "monks" because from a distance they resemble lone figures in black robes. But the older explanation may carry more weight. The Roman author Pliny the Elder believed the larger of the two, Megas Kalogeros, was the ancient rock called Aix, the very formation from which the Aegean Sea got its name. Megas Kalogeros covers just 6,000 square meters and rises 36.5 meters above sea level. Its cliffs are nearly impossible to scale. A 17th-century engraving by Francesco Pioncento from 1688 shows a monastery on the summit, complete with a crane that lowered boats to the water since the slopes made any other approach impossible. Multiple historical records and foreign traveler accounts describe the same structure, with buildings, cultivated plots, and fortifications including a round tower. What happened to the monastery is one of the stranger stories in the Aegean. British merchant Bernard Randolph wrote in his 1687 Oxford publication "The Present State of the Islands in the Archipelago" that while passing through Smyrna he heard the island had exploded. He noted that merchants in Smyrna told him their coins and seals had lost their value when the island blew up, and that rocks were hurled as far as Tinos and Andros. Seismologist Vasilis Papazachos linked the destruction to a major 6.8-magnitude eruption near Santorini in 1650, which sent volcanic ash as far as Asia Minor and generated a tsunami reaching 18 meters at Ios and 30 meters on Patmos. Despite all of this, there is still no formal scientific explanation for what exactly destroyed Kalogeros. The monastery may have also served as something of an unofficial vault, with pirates and merchants alike using the crane to deposit money and valuables on a rock nobody else could easily reach. Today Megas Kalogeros holds only an automatic lighthouse, placed th...