The island is also famous in the myths as the place from where Achilles set sail for Troy after Odysseus discovered him in the court of Lycomedes.

[7] In c. 475 BC, according to Thucydides (1.98), Cimon defeated the Dolopians (the original inhabitants) and conquered the entire island.

The island lay on the strategic trade route between Attica and the Black Sea (Athens depended on supplies of grain reaching it through the Hellespont).

[8] Rupert Brooke, the famous English poet, is buried on Skyros, having died on board a French hospital-ship moored off the island on 23 April 1915, during World War I.

[10] The tomb that visitors see today when they visit the grave, which is located in the Tris Boukes Bay, is one that was commissioned by Brooke’s mother and was placed after the 1st World War.

[11] In 1941 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro wrote the World War II poem Scyros, which he set on the island Skyros "because it was a tribute to and irony upon Rupert Brooke.

[15] Konstantinos Faltaits [el] described the dire consequences of the pandemic in a rare chronicle published in 1919, titled Ἡ γρίππη στὴ Σκῦρο 'The flu in Skyros'.

[16] The north of the island is covered by a forest, while the south, dominated by the highest mountain, called Kochila, (792 m), is bare and rocky.

Skyros has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Csa) with mild to cool, rainy winters and pleasantly warm, dry summers.