If you are going to Greece this summer and the crowds on Santorini give you pause, here is the trade Syros offers, and what you get for it.

You give up the postcard. There is no caldera, and none of the blue domes and white walls you pictured. What you get instead is a town that is still itself: a working Greek port, busy with its own life, where a visitor is treated as a guest. And it costs a fraction of what Santorini does.

Ermoupoli, the main town, looks nothing like that. It is pastel mansions and marble staircases climbing two hills above the harbor, more like an Italian port than a Greek island, built in the years when this was the country’s busiest harbor.

It is the capital of the Cyclades, which surprises people. Mykonos and Santorini have drawn the crowds for decades; Syros never did. It has its own industries and about twenty thousand people living here year-round, so it has never had to rely on tourism. National Geographic describes an island “preferring not to call attention to itself.”

What you get for less.

The things that make Santorini hard in July are not problems here. You can get a table at the best taverna the same night. A room costs about a third of the caldera price, and a taverna dinner runs a fraction of the same meal there. The food is better than the price suggests; chefs who trained in Europe’s best kitchens are cooking here now, and two Ermoupoli restaurants made the Michelin guide last year. You can park, swim off a quiet beach, and look at the harbor with no one behind you waiting for your spot. You can watch the sunset from a beach taverna on the west coast with a beer and hardly anyone around. The water stays warm, and the tavernas stay open well into October, so you are not locked into July and August.

What you came for.

You get treated like a person. The waiters and shopkeepers are not worn down by ten thousand visitors a day, so they have time for you.

The best part is the evening. When the heat drops, the whole town comes down to the marble square and walks it, the old couples and the kids and the families, the way they do every night. You sit with a coffee or an ouzo while it happens around you. In the morning, you buy your fish from the boats that brought it in.

That is what the Dispatch was about. What so many of us are after this summer, a place that still feels lived-in and unhurried, is right here for the price of a ferry from Athens. You can come over from Santorini on the day the crowds wear you down.