by Violeta Rozova; photography by Anthony Georgieff

The owner of one of the two taverns on the Aliki beach puts a second pitcher of retsina and a plate of yoghurt topped with Thassos honey on the table. Figs taken from the jam jar stick out from the yoghurt. "It's on the house!" he says and hurries off to clean the table that another jolly company has just left.

The paper table covers of the restaurant are of the recently trendy type – with a map of the island printed on them. From such a perspective Thassos looks small, traversable and familiar. Especially when you live in Bulgaria.

The Greek island that is closest to Bulgaria has several main advantages. If you start from Sofia, it will take the same time to get to it as it will take to reach Sozopol. It is cheap and quiet for a holiday. The crowds from Britain and the United States that have turned Rhodes, Crete and Mykonos into binge drinking destinations have not even heard its name. It is mainly Greek and Balkan tourists that come to enjoy its clean beaches.

The Bulgarians make up a large part of them not only for practical but also for sentimental reasons. There is some evidence that the island was inhabited by the Thracians before they were ousted by the Greeks in the 7th Century BC. In the Second World War, the island was among the "new lands" administrated by Bulgaria; and Dimitar Dimov, one of the most widely read Bulgarian writers, described it enthusiastically in 1942: "Nowhere else have I seen more fabulously blue scenery, more peace, more quiet! Everything here is brimming with light and sultry azure, everything is bright and dazzling, albeit almost melancholically quiet," he wrote in Impressions From a Journey to Thassos.

You can go and look around Thassos within a day – by car on the road that passes all along the coast. The ancient ruins, the castle and the harbour of its capital Limenas take two hours to visit. Thus the beaches become the main place where to spend the long summer days.