On a wild swim tour of Greece you might not brush aginst ancient stones. But each stroke you take breaks through a history as deep as the Ionian Sea.

We’re in the Mediterranean off Greece. Eight swimmers from different countries, backgrounds and ages all brought together by a passion for launching ourselves into the blue sea.

You don’t need to stroll down a great boulevard or visit the ruins of an ancient civilisation to reach back in history. You can explore a country from a different perspective. A swim trip will allow you to connect with past lives and offer a new view of the world. And as 70% of the Earth is covered by water there is no shortage of oceans, seas, lakes and rivers to discover.

The rise of popularity of wild swimming and swim tourism has not only encouraged more people into the water for health benefits, both physical and mental, but has created a new means for us to consider the part oceans and seas have played in history and how the course of rivers has helped determine where we live.   

Swimming allows us to observe our surroundings with a special kind of concentration. In the water, swimmers can’t be distracted by the bleep of an iPhone or the traffic on a busy street. Our focus is immediate and intense as we swim to a point on the horizon or drift along in the current of ocean tides or the flow of a river. Swimmers regard the world from a different angle.

The numbers of wild swimmers — those who chose natural outdoor environments for dips or distance in all seasons — has increased since the Covid-19 pandemic. But the nature of the pastime means there are no reliable statistics of how many of us share the love of wild waters. 

Our swim group has dived into the sea off the island of Mathraki, close to the Greek island of Corfu. Part of an archipelago, Mathraki is only two kilometres (1.2 miles) long and has fewer than a hundred people. During our week we will circumnavigate the island and explore a dozen of the rocky islets in the waters nearby.

Some seas are especially rich in history, sometimes real and sometimes fictional, and this part of Greece has no shortage of both. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the waters of the Mediterranean were alive with a pantheon of powerful gods. The myths told those stories. 

As we swim between windswept rocky outcrops, our guide on the safety boat gives a shout and points out to the open waters. We look up just in time to catch a glimpse of dolphins leaping above the waves looking equally at home in the air and the sea. 

It reminded me of one of the tales about Zeus, the king of the Greek gods. To eliminate a rival in love, Zeus decided to whip up a storm to sink a ship. But when he realised that innocent sailors would drown he turned them into dolphins. And that explains why dolphins are drawn to people and boats. They were once human.

A different kind of odyssey

Over dinner we discuss Homer’s tale of Odysseus, and his long journey home from the Trojan Wars. He faced hazards on many islands and coasts claimed by Malta and Italy, as well as Greece.

We can take our pick where these fantastical adventures happened. 

Through foggy goggles we play a game to imagine we are passing the beach of the lotus eaters where Odysseus’ men ate the forgetfulness-inducing plant and had to be dragged back to their boat, or the rocks of the Sirens — the women whose song is so beautiful sailors hearing it leapt to their deaths trying to reach them. 

As we swim into caves eroded into the rocky shorelines, we think of Odysseus and his men trapped in one of those caves by the man-eating Cyclops.

Long before the Greek and Roman myths were imagined, Neanderthals took to the sea. Archaeologists have found their remains, dating back 100,000 years, on the Italian coast. The Neanderthal’s ear bones show damage from what is now called swimmer’s ear, caused by too much moisture getting into the ear. It would seem that the earliest wild swimmers harvested the sea for clams, fish and shells.  

Swimming along the shipping routes

Our swim took us through the waters which were once dominated by the Venetians who ruled the waves to control shipping routes. Their ships hugged the same coastlines where we would stop to apply more sunblock.

For three centuries to 1797 the power of Venice was marked by fortresses along the Adriatic from Corfu in Greece and along the coast to Dubrovnik in Croatia and beyond to the Byzantine Empire. 

In Corfu, we had seen the Venetian winged lion carved into the stones of the old fort as we swam near the harbour. The winged lion, seen on every maritime structure that was ruled by Venice, was a warning sign for unfriendly ships to beware. But the Venetian Empire was superseded by Napoleon’s rule, then by the powerful British fleet. 

During World War Two, Italy occupied these strategic coastlines but the Allied forces swept them aside. In recent years it is tourists who have invaded. 

At the end of our week in the water, our swimming is stronger and faster. We had traversed many kilometres in a sapphire sea. Although we were never far apart in the water, we all had the distance for our own thoughts. And it felt like the Greek gods and the Venetian ships carrying exotic goods from the East were just over the horizon, if only we had lifted our heads a bit higher. 

Three questions to consider:

1. How can wild swimming help someone connect to historical events?
2. How are our histories connnected by the oceans, lakes and rivers we live near?
3. Has a swim ever encouraged you to seek out new information?

Tira Shubart is a freelance journalist and media trainer based in London. She has produced television news and trained journalists across four continents for international broadcasters, including BBC News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera, over several decades.