Greece - Blue, Blue, Electric Blue

Rocky Tinos flies under the radar among Greece’s big hitters. But its wild, marble-carved beauty makes it a quietly romantic hit. By Antonia Quirke.

- Antonia Quirke

In the village of Pyrgos on Tinos, an immense and aged plane tree in the central square casts morning light like leaping green flames. It’s known for its marble sculptors, and sometimes all you hear along narrow, tilted streets is the sound of chisels. White marble memorials. White marble busts everywhere of the heroes of 1821, with moustaches that look as though they were grown to exhibit in some prestigious hall of Moustaches of the Revolution. A village of marble, on an island 30 minutes by water from Mykonos, that seems (even more than most in this latitude) to be an uprush of metamorphic stone. “That tree is thirsty,” nods Vagelis, a local acquaintance, as we watch through tessellations of green a class of school children quietly eating yogurt and honey at the café next door, every one perfectly neat with new-term hair, gazed at by thin, enquiring cats. Time deepens. Now and again, we turn our heads to examine a handsome man with the tattoo of a serpent on his neck hauling a hunk of marble up the street in a cloud of sugary dust.

It is a good day. A Greek day, with a ringing sky of the type you get when you’re able to see not just the detail on every distant leaf, but parts of 16 other Cycladic islands from a single vantage point near the main town of Chora. But then quickly—because the wind dominates for 10 months of the year—the sea whips up to meet the sky, forming an amethystine veil. As I drive towards the coast later, the atmosphere begins to intensify, with the scent of dittany and sage and woody fleabane that smells like cannabis; its odour hangs over my slow progress along the one curving road north, stuck behind a bus full of the faithful being driven after the Divine Liturgy for a plate of lunchtime sardines.