It's worth poking around the cemetery amid the recently restored headstones for the grave of M Bourgade, one of France's top WWI air aces, who died here of malaria while working as a mission worker.
Later, the island became a government headquarters and base for explorations. Today the district local government headquarters is on the mainland at Bereina and the island has been in serious economic decline since. An airstrip that is more bush than strip and derelict buildings are the only reminders that at one stage Siria village once boasted a fisheries industry, wharfs, a bank and guesthouse.
In 1972 local seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, Susan Karike (now Mrs Huhume), surprised everyone and won the nation-wide competition to design the national flag.
The most recent addition to the landscape is the remains of a whale that washed up here in 2006. Many of the vertebrae can be seen around the village being used as stools and the skull still juts out from the sand. By all accounts things got a bit whiffy around town while the carcass rotted.
