Long live the Ikarians

Gregoris Tsahas has smoked a packet of cigarettes every day for 70 years. High up in the hills of Ikaria, in his favourite cafe, he draws on what must be around his half-millionth fag. I tell him smoking is bad for the health and he gives me an indulgent smile, which suggests he's heard the line before. He's 100 years old and, he says, aside from appendicitis, he has not known a day of illness in his life.

Tsahas has short-cropped white hair, a robustly handsome face and a bone-crushing handshake. He says he drinks two glasses of red wine a day, but on closer interrogation he concedes that, like many other drinkers, he has underestimated his consumption by a couple of glasses.

The secret of a good marriage, he says, is never to return drunk to your wife. He's been married for 60 years.

"I'd like another wife," he says. "Ideally one about 55."

Tsahas is known at the cafe as a bit of a gossip and a joker. He comes here twice a day. It's a one-kilometre walk from his house over uneven, sloping terrain. That's four hilly kilometres a day. Not many people half his age manage that far elsewhere.

In Ikaria, a Greek island in the far east of the Mediterranean, about 50 kilometres from the Turkish coast, characters such as Tsahas are not exceptional. With its beautiful coves, rocky cliffs, steep valleys and broken canopy of scrub and olive groves, Ikaria looks similar to any number of other Greek islands. But there is one vital difference: people here live much longer than the population on other islands and on the Greek mainland. In fact, people here live on average 10 years longer than those in the rest of Europe and the United States - about one in three Ikarians lives into their 90s. Not only that, but they also have much lower rates of cancer and heart disease, suffer significantly less depression and dementia, maintain a sex life into old age and remain physically active well into their 90s. What is the secret of Ikaria? What do its inhabitants know that the rest of us don't?