Socotra

Socotra's history is a history of the sea. The island appears in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant's guide of the first century AD, under the name Dioscorida, as a place of few inhabitants trading in aloe, tortoiseshell and the red resin called dragon's blood. Inscriptions and graffiti left in Hoq Cave by sailors from India, South Arabia, Ethiopia and the Greek-speaking Mediterranean show that ships called here over many centuries on the monsoon routes between India and the Red Sea.

A Christian community existed on the island from late antiquity, linked to the Church of the East. The sixth-century Greek merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes gave the earliest account of Christians here, and in the tenth century the Arab geographer al-Hamdani recorded that most islanders were Christian; cross engravings, tombs and ruined church sites survive. Islam gradually became the island's religion during the medieval period. In 1507 a Portuguese fleet seized the island, hoping to control the mouth of the Red Sea, and abandoned it a few years later.

By the early sixteenth century the island belonged to the Mahra sultanate of Qishn and Socotra, whose rulers held both the island and a stretch of the mainland coast. Britain took the island into treaty protection in the 1880s as part of the Aden Protectorate, valuing it as a station on the route to India. The sultanate was abolished in October 1967, when Socotra became part of South Yemen, and between 1976 and 1979 the island served as a base for the Soviet navy. Socotra Airport opened in 1999, ending an isolation in which the island could be reached only by cargo ship, and UNESCO inscribed the archipelago as a World Heritage Site in 2008.

The island's most distinctive inheritance is its language. Soqotri is one of the Modern South Arabian languages, a small group spoken in southern Arabia before Arabic spread with Islam, and it survives here as a largely oral tongue with its own tradition of poetry, sung verse and improvised contests. Arabic is the language of school, government and business, and the position of Soqotri, unwritten and unofficial, is a recurring concern for islanders and linguists alike.

Life has traditionally divided between the coast and the mountains. Fishermen worked the shore in small boats; herders kept goats, sheep and some cattle on the plateaus, living in stone houses and caves and moving with the seasons; and date palms in the wadis provided the other staple. Customary law governed grazing, water and the harvesting of trees, including the tapping of dragon's blood resin and the cutting of aloe, and those rules are part of why the island's plant life survived so well.

Socotrans are Muslim and conservative in dress and manners, and hospitality is pressed on visitors as a matter of honour. Weddings involve drumming, dancing and sung poetry, and oral knowledge — of plants, stars, winds and grazing — remains respected. Tourism, mobile phones and mainland Arabic culture have all arrived quickly in a place that was isolated for most of its history, and the strain between change and continuity is felt keenly on the island.

About 50,000 people live on Socotra, the largest number in and around Hadibu on the north coast, with Qalansiyah the only other town of any size and the rest of the population scattered in coastal villages and mountain hamlets. Hadibu holds the market, the hospital, the schools, the offices and the port, and it has grown quickly with concrete building, so that the small town now dominates island life in a way it did not two generations ago.

The economy rests on fishing, livestock, dates, government salaries, money sent home by Socotrans working in the Gulf, and the trickle of tourism. Almost all manufactured goods, and much of the food, arrive by ship or plane, which makes prices high and supplies irregular. Electricity comes from generators and is limited, water is drawn from wadis, springs and wells, and mobile and internet coverage is patchy and slow.

The year is divided by the monsoon. From about June to September the south-west wind makes the sea unworkable for small boats, closes much of the coast and keeps people at home; the cooler months bring fishing, visitors and movement. Cyclones in 2015 and 2018 destroyed boats, houses and palm groves and are still referred to as markers of recent time. The island has been spared the worst of the war on the mainland, but it shares the country's economic crisis, and the rial's fall has pushed up the price of everything imported.

Socotri cooking is plain and depends on what the island produces. Fish is the mainstay: tuna, kingfish and reef fish caught from small boats, eaten fresh, grilled over charcoal or fried, and also salted and dried for the monsoon months when boats cannot go out. Lobster and squid are taken seasonally. Rice, imported by the sack, is the base of most meals, and the usual dish set before a guest is a platter of rice topped with fish or goat.

Goat is the meat of celebration and of hospitality, slaughtered for weddings and for visitors and cooked simply, often boiled or roasted over a fire. Milk matters in the mountains, from goats and cows and sometimes camels, and is drunk fresh, soured, or churned into ghee that is used for cooking and given as a gift. Dates from the wadi palm groves are the traditional sweet and a staple in their own right, and they were historically dried and stored for the lean season.

Bread is flat and baked on a griddle or against the wall of a clay oven. Vegetables and fruit are mostly imported and expensive. Tea, black and heavily sweetened, is drunk all day and offered on every visit, and coffee is less common than on the mainland. Alcohol has no place in island life. Honey from the island's hives is prized, as Yemeni honey is everywhere in the country, and is sold in small quantities in Hadibu.