Tinos

Tinos lies in the northern Cyclades close to Andros, Delos and Mykonos, covering some 194.5 square kilometres. The 2021 census recorded 8,934 residents, making it one of the more populous islands in the group. Its interior is dominated by the jagged peak of Exomvourgo and by Tsiknias, the island's highest point at 750 metres, while the unusually flat plain of Falatados and the boulder-strewn landscape around the village of Volax add striking variety to the terrain.

A Landscape Unlike the Rest of the Cyclades

Most Cycladic islands read as variations on the same theme; Tinos does not. Exomvourgo rises to 641 metres as a bare, rugged outcrop with none of the softness of its neighbours, and the plateau at Volax is covered in rounded granite boulders, some of them ten metres high, scattered thickly enough that the field is sometimes described as the largest of its kind in Europe. Around Pyrgos the rock turns to green-veined marble. Between the two mountains lies the fertile plain of Falatados, terraced and farmed in a way that has shaped the island's rural architecture: Tinos counts roughly a thousand ornate stone dovecotes and some eighty windmills, more than anywhere else in the Cyclades. The coastline is equally varied, with Kolymbithra and Panormos facing the open sea to the north and Kionia and Agios Sostis in the calmer south.

The Island of Pilgrimage

Tinos is best known across Greece as a place of pilgrimage. In July 1822 a nun named Pelagia reported a series of visions in which the Virgin told her that a buried icon lay in a nearby field and asked that a church be raised over it. Excavation on 30 January 1823 uncovered the remains of an early Christian church, a well, and a Byzantine icon of the Annunciation. The Church of Panagia Evangelistria was built on the spot the same year, a large white marble basilica that still dominates the Chora. It draws crowds every year on 15 August, when many pilgrims cover the 800 metres from the ferry wharf to the church on their hands and knees.

Marble, Sculptors and the Venetian Centuries

The island also has a long artistic pedigree, having produced sculptors and painters such as Yannoulis Chalepas, Nikiphoros Lytras and Nikolaos Gysis. Marble carving here is a living craft rather than a museum subject: in 2015 the marble craftsmanship of Tinos was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage, and the Museum of Marble Crafts sits just outside Pyrgos, the village at the centre of the tradition. The other formative influence was Venice. A Byzantine fortress on Exomvourgo, renamed Castello di Santa Elena, came under direct Venetian rule in 1390 and grew into a walled town of several hundred houses and five churches behind some 600 metres of ramparts. It held out longer than anywhere else in the archipelago, and Tinos was the last Venetian possession in the Cyclades until an Ottoman force landed on 5 June 1715; the garrison surrendered, and the fortress and the town inside it were dismantled within three days. The hill had already been occupied far earlier, with finds from the Copper Age and the Geometric period and the remains of a temple of Demeter.

Arriving by Sea

Tinos has been a landfall for sailors for a very long time. At Kionia, about three kilometres west of the Chora, stand the ruins of a sanctuary of Poseidon and Amphitrite, founded at the end of the fourth century BC and abandoned in the middle of the third century AD; it is the only sanctuary in the Cyclades dedicated to the sea god and his wife. Modern crews face the same conditions the ancient ones did, since the island sits full in the path of the summer meltemi and its northern beaches can be lively when it blows. With three ports linking it to Mykonos, Andros, Syros, Piraeus and Rafina, Tinos sits conveniently along many Cycladic sailing routes, which is why it remains a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Greece.