Burgazada wears the name of a one-eyed general. Antigonus fought to hold Alexander the Great's fractured empire, and his son Demetrius fortified this island and called it Antigoni in his father's honour — the name Greeks use to this day. The Turkish name came later, from pyrgos, "the tower," for the fortress on the heights, worn down over centuries to Burgaz. Third largest of the nine Princes' Islands, it stayed largely Greek-speaking into the twentieth century and became the lifelong home of Sait Faik Abasıyanık, the writer who turned its fishermen and pine paths into modern Turkish literature.
You arrive to a domed church standing over the harbour and streets with no private cars — even the horse carriages are gone, replaced by quiet electric carts. A single pine-covered hill rises behind the town, its woods regrown after a hard fire, and lanes run west to Kalpazankaya, "the counterfeiter's rock," where people gather on the cliffs to watch the sun drop into the Marmara. This is the calmest of the big islands: small swimming coves, a slow waterfront, and Sait Faik's house kept much as he left it.