If you go to Karpathos in August, one strange thing strikes you: the island is full of people who look Karpathian but speak American English to each other, or German, or Australian. They're the Karpathians of the diaspora — the children and grandchildren of those who left the island between the 1950s and the 1980s to find work elsewhere. Every August they come back. Not all the diaspora Karpathians return every year, but August is the month when the proportion is highest.
Karpathian emigration to the United States was massive between 1950 and 1970. It's estimated there are more Karpathians by origin in New York than on the island itself. In Baltimore there's a neighbourhood with an organised Karpathian community, with its own Orthodox church and its own cultural associations. In August, these families come back — with the American children who don't speak Greek, with the grandchildren who have never been.
The diaspora Karpathians come back the way you return to a home that's no longer yours but is still yours. You can feel that contradiction in the air.
For the island, this annual return is economically vital and culturally complex. Prices go up, the restaurants fill, the villas built in the 1990s with American money open up after eleven months shut. And families reunite, mixing the Greek of forty years ago with the English of today.