Samos

Compare the two ways off this island in our timetable:

• Kuşadası — about 75 minutes.
• Piraeus — about 9 hours 15 minutes, overnight.

Athens is seven times further away by sea than another country. If you are already flying into the region, İzmir is worth pricing against Athens — the ferry leg from the Turkish side is a morning, not a night.

Kuşadası is the gateway to Ephesus, roughly twenty kilometres inland, and the crossing is short enough to go and come back in a day. Very few Greek islands can put a site of that scale within a day's reach.

Treat it as a border crossing regardless: passport, not identity card, and formalities at both ends that take longer than the sailing. There is a second Turkish link to Seferihisar at about two hours.

Samos sits between two island groups and touches both:

• Chios — 3 sailings at about 3 hours, northward into the North Aegean chain.
• Kos — 3 sailings, roughly 4 hours south, with Dodekanisos Seaways, opening the Dodecanese.
• Mykonos — about 4 h 25 m west, the Cyclades connection.

That is unusual. Most Greek islands belong to one group; Samos can be the pivot between three.

Because the island connects north, south and west, it works well at either end of a longer route rather than in the middle. Fly into İzmir, cross to Samos, work south through Kos to Rhodes, and fly home from there — no leg repeated, no return to Athens.

The reverse also works. What does not work is treating Samos as a stop on a Cyclades trip: the crossings west are long and infrequent, and the island's centre of gravity is firmly eastern.

Vathy and Pythagorio are about half an hour apart by road; Karlovasi is further, on the other side of the island. There is a bus network but it is built around the towns rather than around ferry times, and late arrivals can find themselves without a connection.

If you are changing between a Turkish crossing at Pythagorio and a Greek sailing from Vathy on the same day, allow real time for the transfer rather than the map distance.

Samos is green and mountainous in a way the Cyclades are not — pine and vineyard rather than rock and whitewash — and it produces a sweet muscat wine that is the local export. The Heraion and the Eupalinian aqueduct, a sixth-century BC tunnel driven through a mountain from both ends at once, are near Pythagorio.

It is large enough that a car earns its cost, which is not true of every island in this guide.

The Turkish crossings run year round, which is worth knowing because most Greek island international links do not. Blue Star's Piraeus service also runs through winter. What thins out is the lateral network — Chios, Kos, the Cyclades — leaving Samos well connected east and west but poorly connected along the chain.

May, June and September give the full picture without the summer pressure on the Kuşadası border desks.