Tinos

Tinos had 8934 residents at the 2021 census, and more than half of them (5111) lived in the community of Tinos town, known locally as Chora, which is the port and the seat of the municipality. The mountain that seems to have mattered most to the island's history is Exomvourgo (641 m), a jagged peak ringed by small villages, which carried the Venetian fortress and was the administrative centre from 1207. Venice held the island for more than three centuries, from 1390 until 1715. In that year an Ottoman force took the fortress and, within three days, dismantled almost all of it together with the town inside, and Chora has been the capital ever since.

Orthodox and Catholic communities live side by side on Tinos, and the Catholic archbishopric has its offices at Xinara, on the slope of Exomvourgo. Old houses in the village still carry coats of arms above their doors, and among its Catholic churches is Panagia Rodariou (built between 1860 and 1870).

The church of Panagia Evangelistria, which dominates Chora, was begun in 1823 on the spot where, on 30 January of that year, a worker found an icon of the Annunciation, after a search that had followed the visions of Pelagia, a nun of the Kechrovouni convent (then about seventy, and canonised in 1970). The great day is the fifteenth of August, the feast of the Dormition, when many pilgrims cover the 800 m between the ferry wharf and the church on their hands and knees, with 25 March (the Annunciation) the other large feast.

The fifteenth carries a darker memory too, since on that day in 1940, in peacetime, the Italian submarine Delfino torpedoed the Greek cruiser Elli at anchor off Tinos for the feast, killing nine of her crew. A small mausoleum beside the church of the Finding (Evreseos) now honours them. Anyone planning to be here in mid-August would likely do well to book the boat and the bed well ahead.

Marble is the island's other great subject, and the Museum of Marble Crafts at Pyrgos, run by the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation and opened in 2008, presents Tinos as the most important centre of marble craft in modern Greece. In 2015, what is more, UNESCO inscribed Tinian marble craftsmanship on its list of intangible heritage, describing the cypresses, flowers, birds and ships carved on buildings, churches, cemeteries and fanlights. By the same account each master trains one or two apprentices (usually relatives), who receive a small chest of tools when they qualify.

Pyrgos, 23 km from Chora, has a school of fine arts for marble craft, running from 1955, and the house of the sculptor Yannoulis Chalepas (1851 to 1938) is now a museum. Volax, on a plateau in the centre of the island, is evidently another matter, with its houses set among large, almost spherical grey rocks, and it was traditionally a village of basket weavers. Notwithstanding its 51 residents (at the 2011 census), it keeps a small folklore museum and a 380-seat amphitheatre, and at Easter climbers come for the boulders.

Some six hundred dovecotes survive, often near streams (the pigeons need water close to their nests) and around villages such as Tarampados and Tripotamos. Keeping pigeons is a habit inherited from the Venetians, and the dovecotes usually have two levels, the birds nesting upstairs, with façades worked in triangles, rectangles, rhombuses and circles of slate, a decoration often described as stone embroidery.

Our two houses, Villa Tinos A and Villa Tinos B, belong to one property on a hillside at Agia Varvara, a ten-minute drive from Chora, with a pool, private terraces and a view over the town and the sea to Mykonos, Delos and Syros. The town, with its supermarket, pharmacies, restaurants and port, has what a week or two on the island may call for. Write to us with your dates and the number of guests.

There is no airport on Tinos (only a heliport, close to the beach of Agios Fokas), so the island is reached by sea, on ferries and high-speed boats sailing from Piraeus and from Rafina, the second port of Athens (25 km east of the centre), and the crossing from Rafina takes about two hours on the faster boats. Mykonos is about half an hour away by boat, so one can also fly to Mykonos or Syros and continue by sea.

Summers are warm and dry and winters mild and wet, with highs of about 28 °C in July and August. The meltemi, the strong, dry north wind of the Aegean, blows between about mid-May and mid-September, and Tinos is windy enough to be called the island of Aeolus, so spring and early autumn are possibly calmer. Komi has held an artichoke festival in June (on 15 June in 2019), though the date is worth confirming.

Tinian cooking leans on the island's own products, among them louza (pork fillet marinated in wine and spices, then air-dried), artichokes from the valley of Komi, capers gathered from the rocky ground and figs dried in the August sun. The cheeses, made mostly from cow's milk, include volaki (also called sklavotyro), a ball-shaped cheese eaten fresh or dried, and the soft, peppery kopanisti, which carries a protected designation of origin, while kariki, a strong blue cheese, is aged in gourds and the fresh, unsalted petroma is the base for most of the others.