The Last Greek on Kinaros: “A Bag of Gold and I Still Won’t Leave”
Rinio Thiraios, born in 1945, is the only permanent resident of Kinaros, a rocky islet between Amorgos and the Dodecanese in the Aegean Sea. She lives alone, 365 days a year, in a single room built into a concrete fishing dock, with no running water, no sewage system, power supplied by solar panels, and contact with the outside world limited to a satellite phone and, weather permitting, a subsidized weekly boat from Amorgos.
She arrived on the island nine days after she was born and has never truly left. Her parents were farmers and livestock keepers, permanent residents of Kinaros when a small community still existed there. Today, the old settlement is abandoned, the neighbors' houses crumbled to ruins. Rinio is all that remains.
Her days are filled with physical labor: climbing steep, rocky slopes to feed and water her animals before sundown, tending to roughly 200 goats and sheep, a dozen chickens, and her dog Siva. She cooks on a gas burner in her courtyard, boiling rockfish in seawater for soup when she has them. During storms, she can go months without seeing another person.
She lost her husband Mikis in 2013. Every other day she climbs to the abandoned Byzantine church of Saint George, built in 1878 by her great-grandfather, and lights a candle. In the churchyard stands a memorial to three Greek Navy officers killed on February 11, 2016, when an Agusta Bell 212 helicopter crashed on the island.
When asked why she refuses to leave, her answer was immediate: "This is my home. If they gave me a sack of gold coins, I'd give it to the poor and I still wouldn't go anywhere."
In 2023, Gastronomos magazine named her one of its Quality Award honorees. She couldn't attend the ceremony because her animals were giving birth and needed constant care. She sent her daughter Akathi from Kalymnos in her place.
