Of all Kuwait's islands, Failaka is the one people have lived on longest, and the reason lies under it: fresh groundwater, rare among Gulf islands. Portuguese mapmakers simply marked it Ilha de Aguada, the island of the water well. That well held people for four thousand years. Bronze-Age merchants from the Sumerian city of Ur ran it as a trading waypoint for the Dilmun civilisation, which knew it as Agarum and left cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals now kept in Kuwait's museums. When Alexander the Great's fleet reached the Gulf, his officers renamed the island Ikaros and raised a walled sanctuary on the southwest shore holding two Greek temples, one of them Artemis's. A limestone stele dug up in front of it in 1960 records a Seleucid officer ordering athletic and musical contests to be held here. Even the modern name is a Greek word: phylakion, an outpost.
The island's other ruin is a single generation old. When Iraq invaded in 1990, Failaka's whole population — more than two thousand people, with schools and a town, Al-Zawr, that had been lived in longer than anywhere else in Kuwait — was expelled to the mainland, never to return; the 2011 census counted 147 residents. Iraqi troops mined the beaches and used the houses for target practice, and the houses still stand: concrete pocked with shrapnel, dead trees in the doorways, sand drifting into the rooms. The mines are long cleared and the ferry from Salmiya lands day-trippers on quiet beaches, but almost nothing has been rebuilt, and the resort city announced for Failaka has yet to break ground. Walk the empty streets in March and you hear the strangest thing about the place — birdsong. Migrants crossing the desert drop exhausted into the overgrown gardens of the dead village, which for a few weeks is the busiest ground on the island.