Aegina's fish market is easy to walk past. It sits on a short, narrow street a few steps back from the harbour front, near the church of Panagitsa, and from the waterfront it looks like nothing more than a gap between buildings. Turn into it and you are in the middle of the island's oldest working trade: a handful of stalls under awnings, crates of ice, and fishermen who were out in the Saronic Gulf a few hours earlier selling what they brought back.
Go in the morning. The boats come in early, the good fish goes fast, and by early afternoon the best of it has been bought by the tavernas and by islanders who know exactly what they want. Late August is a decent time to look. This is the season for sardines and picarel, the small silver fish the Greeks call sardeles and marides, sold cheaply by the kilo and best fried whole. You will also see bogue, red mullet, octopus hanging out to dry in the sun, squid, and cuttlefish. Everything is priced by the kilo, so ask before you commit, and expect wild fish to cost considerably more than farmed.
Buying here is straightforward if you know what to look at. Clear, domed eyes rather than sunken cloudy ones. Gills that are properly red underneath. Flesh that springs back when pressed. Greek and EU rules require sellers to label whether fish is fresh or frozen and whether it is wild or farmed, and the signs on the crates will tell you if you look for them. If you are unsure, point and ask. Most of the sellers have a few words of English and are used to visitors, and they would rather explain than sell you something you will not enjoy.
The other half of the story is what happens in the same alley in the evening. A cluster of small ouzeri and mezedopoleia operate right beside the stalls, with tables spilling out onto the pavement, and they cook what came off the boats that day. The format is simple: order a bottle of ouzo or tsipouro, and food arrives in small plates to share. Grilled sardines, fried marides eaten whole, octopus off the charcoal, a plate of tomatoes and capers, bread to mop up the oil. It is not a place for a formal three-course dinner and the service is unhurried by design.
Two practical notes. The market generally shuts on Sunday and a Monday can be thin, because the boats do not go out on Sunday night, so plan around that if fish is the point of your trip. And eat late. In August the alley holds the day's heat until well after sunset, and the tables do not properly fill until nine or later, which is exactly when it is worth being there. Sitting between the closed-up stalls with a plate of fish that was swimming that morning is about as close to the real Aegina as a visitor can get for the price of a couple of small plates.
Photo: Nicolas Vigier / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)