Aegina Town, the first capital

Arriving by boat, the first thing you see is the chapel of Agios Nikolaos, a white cube with a little dome perched at the tip of the harbour wall, and behind it a row of ochre, cream and pink facades with wrought-iron balconies. Most of them date from the decades after independence, when the town filled with officials, refugees and merchants, and the waterfront still has the air of a small nineteenth-century port rather than a resort.

In January 1828 Ioannis Kapodistrias landed here to take charge of a country that had only just won its war against the Ottomans. For about a year and a half Aegina was where Greece was governed from. Kapodistrias worked in the Kyverneio, the Governor's House, a plain two-storey building a few streets back from the harbour. He built an orphanage for children left alone by the war, set up a national museum to gather the antiquities that were being dug up and carried off, and in 1829 had the new state's first coins, the phoenix, struck in a mint on the island. In 1829 the government moved on to Nafplio, but the buildings remain, scattered through the lanes.

Older still is the Markellos Tower, a stone tower house from the Venetian period standing in a small garden in the centre, where the revolutionary governments of the 1820s held some of their meetings. Walk a few minutes north along the shore and you reach Kolona, a low hill by the sea where people have lived for more than five thousand years. Its name simply means 'column': of the Temple of Apollo that stood on top, one column of grey limestone is still upright, and it has been the landmark of every boat sailing into the harbour for centuries.

The busiest part of town is the market quarter behind the fish market, a covered hall on the waterfront where the morning's catch is laid out on ice. In the narrow streets around it, small ouzeris set out tables on the pavement and grill whatever the fishermen brought in: sardines, octopus, red mullet. Out on the quay, carts sell bags of the island's pistachios, still in their pale shells, and pastry shops turn them into sweets, spreads and ice cream.