Petani is a horseshoe bay on the northwest tip of the Paliki peninsula, on the Ionian island of Kefalonia in Greece, and it is one of those beaches that does the standard Greek-island miracle effortlessly: a curve of bright white pebbles, water that runs from pale turquoise to deep blue, and steep white limestone cliffs falling straight to the shore. It is about 600 meters long, up to 50 meters wide, Blue Flag rated, and the water deepens fast, so you are out of your depth a short way from the pebbles. Two small tavernas sit on a terrace above the bay, reached by a steep, winding, hairpin road with no public transport. It faces west, and the evening swim, watching the colors change on the sea as the sun goes down, is the thing people remember.
The quickest way to describe Petani is by its more famous neighbor. Kefalonia's signature beach is Myrtos, a spectacular cliff-backed cove that appears on every 'best beaches in the world' list and, in high season, fills with the crowds that fame brings; the advice is to arrive by nine or ten in the morning to get a spot. Petani has nearly the same ingredients, the dramatic cliffs, the white pebbles, the impossible blue, and a fraction of the people. It is widely and accurately described as 'Myrtos without the crowds,' which is a real and increasingly rare thing on a celebrated Greek island.
But the most important fact about Petani is not on the beach at all; it is under the whole island. On 12 August 1953, the great Ionian earthquake, magnitude 6.8, struck Kefalonia. It flattened essentially every building on the island except those in Fiskardo, at the far northern tip, killed around 600 people, and lifted the entire island roughly 60 centimeters out of the sea. The survivors who did not emigrate rebuilt Kefalonia from the rubble, to strict anti-earthquake specifications. Almost everything you see on the island, the villages above Petani included, postdates that day. The turquoise serenity sits on top of one of the most completely destroyed and rebuilt places in modern Greece.
Kefalonia carries an older wound too, and it is the one the world knows by accident. In September 1943, after Italy's surrender in the Second World War, German forces massacred the Italian soldiers of the Acqui Division on the island, executing around 5,000 men and drowning some 3,000 more, one of the worst prisoner-of-war atrocities of the war. For decades it was little known outside Greece and Italy. Then Louis de Bernieres set his 1994 novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin on Kefalonia, the 2001 film followed, and the island, and its massacre, and even its earthquake, which the book also describes, became globally familiar.
So Petani is more than a gorgeous swim. It is a quiet, white-pebbled, turquoise alternative to an over-loved beach, on an island whose beauty is laid directly over catastrophe, an earthquake that erased it and a wartime massacre that haunts it. The honest pleasure of the place is the contrast: the lightest, clearest, most carefree water in the Ionian, held by an island that has been destroyed, mourned, and rebuilt, and that wears all of it lightly in the summer sun.
