There is a small island, two miles west of Kastellorizo, that you can see from our harbour on a clear morning. It is called Ro. It has no village. It has, on most maps, no marker except a name. And for forty years — from 1943 to 1982 — one woman lived on it alone, and every single morning, she walked out, raised the Greek flag, and lowered it again at sunset.
Her name was Despoina Achladioti. The Greeks called her, and call her still, Κυρά της Ρω — the Lady of Ro.
An island three miles long, three miles from a foreign coast.
Ro lies between Kastellorizo and the Turkish mainland. Despoina was born on it in 1890 — the only child of a family that had farmed its thin soil for generations. She married late and never had children. By the time the Second World War reached the eastern Aegean, she was past fifty, and almost everyone else had left.
By 1943, the island held three people: Despoina, her husband, and her elderly blind mother. The Italians who occupied the Dodecanese came and went. The Germans came and went. The British came and went. Through all of it, the family stayed.
"This is my home. Where else would I go?"
Her husband died in 1948. Her mother died not long after. From that year, until she was carried off the island in failing health in 1982, Despoina lived on Ro alone — alone with her goats, her well, her small whitewashed house, and the flag she had been raising since the war.
The flag.
She raised it at dawn. She lowered it at dusk. She did this through storms, through the long quiet of winter, through the loud heat of August. She did it on days when nobody at all came past on a boat to see her do it. She did it on days when Turkish patrol boats slowed at the strait to watch.
It was not a piece of theatre. It was not a gesture for visitors — visitors were rare, and most years there were none. It was, by her own simple account, a daily duty: she lived on Greek soil, and so the Greek flag flew above it. The act was small. The persistence was the thing.
A nation noticed.
By the late 1970s, journalists had begun to make the trip across to interview her. She received them politely, fed them whatever she had, and answered their questions in the same brief, undecorated Greek she'd spoken her whole life. The story spread. She was awarded the Cross of the Order of the Phoenix. The Academy of Athens honoured her. None of it changed her routine.
When she finally left Ro in 1982 — too ill to manage alone — the Greek state moved a small detachment of soldiers to the island so that the flag would not stop flying. It hasn't stopped since. Every morning, just after dawn, it goes up. Every dusk, it comes down. The first thing to do, the last thing to do.
Despoina died in Rhodes in 1982, at ninety-two, only weeks after being taken off the island. She is buried on Ro. The grave is a few minutes from the chapel.
Why we still go there.
Ro is not a beach destination. The water is beautiful, the coves are quiet, but you do not visit Ro for the swim. You visit it because of her. Because of what one person, alone, decided to do every morning for forty years on a small island three miles from a foreign coast.
When we take guests across — about three to four hours, depending on the wind — we don't lecture about her. We anchor in the small harbour. We walk the ten minutes to the chapel of Saint George, where the flag is now raised. We point out the well, the goat pens, the foundations of the house she lived in. The story tells itself.
There are bigger stories, in older books, on grander islands. But this is the story of this water — the eastern edge, where the line between countries is two miles of sea, and where one person decided that a flag should fly because she was there to raise it.
