On a clear day, the snow-capped Mount Taygetos, where Spartans left weakling children to die, looks as majestic as Everest. Now, the deeper notes of distant discontent are laced into the moaning and whistling of the wind and into the sound of rain lashing the window panes. Mainland Greece has been in anguish these five years. But, somehow, the pain doesn't appear to disturb Kytherian boisterousness too much as friends and relatives - they overlap for everyone on the island is a cousin, uncle or aunt - pour in to celebrate Easter, which is a major event in the Greek Orthodox calendar. Kythera suffered poverty once. It's robust recovery was the result of globalisation.
There isn't a family on the island without relatives in Australia or the US. They come and go, and I am told the official population of about 4,000 includes 2,000 Kytherians who are registered here to vote but make a living elsewhere. Australia alone has 60,000 people of Kytherian ancestry.
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A lonely memorial on the road that links Potamos, the island's largest village, with the harbour at Agia Pelagia testifies to this spirit of adventure. A plain grey cross and a memorial bench under a drooping tree mark the spot where migrants said their last goodbyes before walking down to the boat in the harbour. The inscription says it was the point of tears, welcome, joy and bitterness.
New arrivals and departing migrants met there until 1908. I knew an Australian in Sydney who had left Kythera when he was only 12, accompanying his 14-year-old brother, both in the charge of a maternal uncle. Their parents stayed back. When the brothers returned, they found they had two sisters!
Life was hard then. The rocky slopes covered in thorn and wattle could not support large families, but the brothers worked hard and became rich. Successful migrants returned or sent money, explaining the elegant vine-covered bungalows and lavish meals of nine and 10 courses, with bottles of ouzo, raki and wine among the dishes of lamb, beef, seafood and cheese cooked in a dozen ways. Few Kytherians I know are fasting for Lent.
We are the only Asians here. Seeing an arrow indicating the Springs of Amir Ali, I expected an Ottoman relic. But no, the Ottomans ruled the mainland but never the seven Ionian Islands, of which Kythera is the southernmost. Nor was there anyone called Amir Ali. Ten years ago, imaginative Kytherians changed the original Greek name of Amiryiala into the more exotic sounding Amir Ali. They wouldn't have dreamt of doing so if Kythera really had known Turkish rule.
Not that the Ionian Islanders are insular. The cricket pitch on nearby Corfu is a reminder that Britain ruled them for 55 years. They showed me some ugly, squat little buildings - one nestling in the arms of the Byzantine ruins of Mylopotamos Castle - that Kytherians had to build for free. Corvee labour was a vassal's service to his overlord.
Once the crossroads of merchants and mariners, washed over by the tides of Phoenician, Byzantine, Venetian, Napoleonic and British colonists, Kythera at once picks up every global whisper about Greece's trembling fortunes. But the flying seven-hour visit Angela Merkel, who is blamed for the European Union's austerity measures, paid to Athens recently didn't seem to excite anyone. Nor do faint signs of foreigners buying Greek bonds and shares.
Kythera wasn't seriously affected in 2010 when a quarter of Greece's economy disappeared, the country found itself frozen out of debt markets and unemployment soared to a record 26.7 per cent. Pay and pensions have been cut, and only the Supreme Court's intervention left military wages intact. Otherwise, discontent might even have endangered the Third Hellenic Republic that was proclaimed in 1974 when the colonels' junta, which had overthrown King Constantine in 1967, finally ended.
That might have impinged on the tranquillity even of Kythera. But economic disaster hasn't been allowed to lead to political crisis. The only clouds lowering over the island are of storms that make this a cold and wet Easter. However, the pundits say the clouds will clear by Easter Sunday. It promises to be a bright and sunny resurrection.