Worth Getting Out of Bed For
In the event that you weary of scuba-diving the shipwreck off Agios Fokas beach, or that gazing dreamily across the Aegean from your own private pool suddenly loses its allure (spoiler alert: it won’t), fear not: there’s plenty more to see and do in them there hills.
Hop in the car and get lost among the island’s dozens of tiny traditional villages – Tripotamos, Ktikado, Pyrgos, Ysternia, Triantaros-Berdemiaros; they fairly trip off the tongue. The reasons Tinos has been dubbed ‘the handmade island’ will become abundantly clear before you travel far. Legend has it that ancient Greek sculptor Phidias taught his craft here, and that heritage is writ large in each and every village. You’ll see it in delicately hewn stone doorways, on sycamore-lined village squares where elderly locals congregate around magnificent marble fountains that wouldn’t look out of place in a museum, and in the hundreds of intricately decorated stone and slate dovecotes that dot the landscape. These plush pigeon palaces are rightly esteemed as some of the most impressive works of art in the Cyclades.
Dig deeper into Tinos’s marble mania at the Museum of Marble Crafts in Pyrgos, where you can admire Neohellenic sculptures galore and even join workshops to learn the craft yourself. Down by the waterfront in Tinos town, the Cultural Foundation of Tinos exhibits a permanent collection of 19th- and 20th-century marble sculptures by legendary local boy Yannoulis Chalepas.
Tinos isn’t short of picturesque chapels and churches either, with around 750 to explore across the island. Chief among these is the Panagia Evangelistria, a Renaissance confection in dazzling whites, creams and eggshell blues that is Greece’s premier shrine to the Virgin Mary. Summer visitors to the island can witness the annual mass procession here on 15 August, when thousands of pilgrims descend on Tinos to pay their respects to the miraculous icon around which the church was built.
And if that doesn’t get you believing in some higher power, the otherworldly landscapes around the village of Volax almost certainly will. Visit at sunset when enormous boulders, here since time immemorial, cast long, eerie shadows across the scarred lunar terrain.