At the top of Karpathos, past the village of Diafani, the sea opens up towards a small, dark island visible from high up on the road. It's called Saria.
It covers about 20 square kilometres, has very few inhabitants — depending on the time of year, sometimes none at all — and an amount of silence that can hardly be found anywhere else in the Mediterranean.
You get there by boat from Diafani, a half-hour crossing. The only landing point is the bay of Palatia, where the ruins remain of a Byzantine village abandoned centuries ago: stone walls still standing, roofless chapels, an ancient harbour that the sea has almost swallowed. Researchers have studied it; tourists rarely reach it.
The waters around Saria are among the cleanest in the Dodecanese. Caretta caretta sea turtles nest on the beaches of the channel separating the two islands. If you go by boat, you might well cross paths with one — slow, indifferent, perfectly at home in a sea it clearly considers its own.