Greece is a place, but it’s also an idea. For those who fall in love with it, Greece represents freedom and joy, untangled limbs, beauty at its purest. As one of the more famous Hellenophiles, Lawrence Durrell, wrote about arriving in Greece after the greyness of England, stepping into Greek light is like “being allowed back into Paradise”.

Greece is not tame like France or Italy – though both those countries have wild, undiscovered pockets, and Italians in particular have a reputation for being unruly. Greece is unique, its beauties and griefs cartoonishly large, as if the Gods themselves designed a place specifically for their own use.

I’m certainly not the first writer to fall in love with it. The enthralled queue goes back beyond Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald in the 1930s to the poet Lord Byron, who died while preparing to fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman empire in the 1820s, and the German scholar Simon Schaidenreisser, the first person to translate the myths and legends of Homer for non-Greek readers, in 1537.

Greek myths have enchanted generations of writers, singers, poets and artists ever since – from Patrick Leigh Fermor to Henry Miller to Leonard Cohen and our own George Johnston and Charmian Clift. But it’s the Greek light, the impossible clarity of the water and the nature of the Greek people that provide the chain of meaning that leads directly from the myths to the happy limbs lying on Greek beaches in 2024. The centuries have changed, but Greece is eternal.

But which part to visit? Do you go to Hydra to find the house by the well, where Charmian Clift wrote on the roof about the “small, brilliant, horseshoe-shaped harbour” below and how she felt reborn walking along the cobblestones, the light and colours and the ringing church bells causing her soul to soar?

Or do you go to Rhodes or Corfu, two islands Lawrence Durrell wrote gloriously about? Both are Greek, but each is unique in the way a snowflake is unique, with its own customs and slang and architecture and geology, so that deciding between their individual beauties is like deciding between the sun and the moon.

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Then there’s the inexhaustible mainland: rugged, mountainous northern Greece, uncharted, where wolves still roam as if in a fairytale. And the great cultural city that is Thessaloniki and the wondrous ancient sites of the Peloponnese. And that’s all before you even get to Athens.

Athens might have a million tourists and be covered in graffiti, but it’s also alive and pulsing and infinitely creative in its constant re-invention. A mere hop, skip and jump away from its noisy, crowded streets you’ll find beaches which are only now being discovered by non-Greeks.