Aegina is the island Athens keeps for itself. It is forty minutes from Piraeus by hydrofoil, an hour and a quarter on the slow boat with the deck open and the Saronic Gulf going gold behind you, and Athenians have treated it as their weekend island for generations.
For two years after independence it was the capital of Greece, and the neoclassical houses along the harbour front still date from then. Behind the town the island is pistachio orchards, a hill of Byzantine chapels, and a Doric temple that has stood on its ridge for two and a half thousand years.
For a wedding, that closeness changes everything. Guests who live in Athens can come for the day and be home by midnight. Guests who fly in can be on the island the afternoon they land. And the couple gets an island wedding, with the sea, the light and the harbour, without the ferry timetable running the weekend.
The island Athens keeps for itself
What Aegina offers a wedding is an island that has not been arranged for visitors. The harbour is a working one, with fishing boats along the quay and the town’s market behind it, and the waterfront is a crescent of neoclassical buildings from the years when the government sat here. Pistachio trees cover the slopes inland, and the island’s own pottery, the Aeginetan jug, still comes out of its workshops. The water in the bays turns a green-blue that people do not expect this close to the city. It is a place with its own life going on, and a wedding here joins that life for a weekend instead of replacing it.
Where to get married on Aegina
The town has the harbour front and the streets of old houses behind it, with churches at the corners and the buildings of the first capital still in use. Above the town and along the coast are the old estates with gardens and sea-facing terraces, and among them is Pyrgos Ralli, which we chose for our guide to the best wedding venues in Greece for its history, its gardens and its sunsets over the water. Perdika, the fishing village on the south coast, has the island’s seafood tavernas along a small harbour with an islet opposite. Agia Marina, on the east coast, has the beach and sits below the temple of Aphaia. Paleochora, the hill of abandoned chapels above the road between them, is the island’s Byzantine town, and the monastery of Agios Nektarios stands on the slope beneath it.
Forty minutes from Piraeus
Aegina has no airport and does not need one. Hydrofoils leave Piraeus for the island roughly every hour and a half through the summer and cross in forty minutes. The car ferries take about an hour and a quarter and run every hour or two, and both services keep going through the winter with fewer sailings. Piraeus itself is twenty five minutes from the centre of Athens by metro and within an hour of the airport by road. On the island, the town is walkable, taxis wait at the harbour, the roads are flat enough for bicycles, and water taxis run to the quieter beaches and to the islets offshore. For a wedding, that means the guest list can include everyone in Athens without anyone booking a hotel, and the guests from abroad can stay on the island or in the city as they prefer.
The best time to get married on Aegina
May, June, September and October are the months we would choose first, warm enough to swim and calm enough to walk, with the island quiet during the week and busy only at weekends. July and August are hot, and the weekend boats fill with Athenians heading for the beaches. Aegina is one of the few islands that stays open through the winter, with mild weather and the tavernas working, so a wedding in April or November is possible here in a way it is not on the Cyclades. Spring brings wildflowers across the island, and mid-September brings the pistachio festival, which is either a reason to come or a reason to pick another weekend, depending on how you feel about a full harbour. Every outdoor ceremony we plan on Aegina has a covered alternative confirmed in advance.
Pistachios, and a temple on the ridge
The island’s pistachios have protected status and a reputation that reaches well beyond Greece, and on a wedding here they turn up everywhere, in the desserts, in the favours, in the sweets on the table at the end of the night. The seafood comes off the boats in Perdika the morning of the wedding. And the history is not a backdrop borrowed for the day. The temple of Aphaia on its ridge above the east coast is one of the best preserved Doric temples in Greece, part of what Greeks call the sacred triangle with the Parthenon and the temple of Poseidon at Sounion, and a wedding that visits it the day before, or holds its photographs beneath it, has the whole of the island’s story in the frame. Aegina asks less of its guests than any other island in Greece and gives them more history per hour than most.
