Pelion

Pelion is a peninsula that runs south-east from Volos in central Greece. A high ridge of pine and beech runs down the middle, between two coasts of completely different character. The western slopes face the sheltered Pagasetic Gulf and have the calmer swimming and the orchards. The eastern slopes drop into the open Aegean and have the harder weather, the better walks and the more dramatic beaches. In myth the centaurs lived here, and Chiron, the wise one, taught Achilles, Asclepius and Jason in a cave above the eastern coast. The cave has never been reliably identified.

The villages are the architectural reason to come. Makrinitsa, Tsagarada, Vizitsa and Milies sit on stone slopes between 500 and 700 metres up. Their family houses are archontika: three-storey mansions of stone and timber with painted ceilings, slate roofs and small flagged courtyards, and a number are now small guesthouses. Walk the kalderimia, the stone-paved mule paths, between villages. The most rewarding short route runs from Tsagarada down to the Damouchari coast.

The local way to eat is the tsipouradiko. A glass of tsipouro, the local spirit distilled in house, arrives with a small plate of meze. Another glass and another plate follow every 20 minutes for as long as you sit. It is the working lunch of the region, not a show put on for tourists. Volos, on the way in, has the best concentration of tsipouradika in mainland Greece.

Pelion has something in every season. Spring brings wildflowers and full streams. Summer is for the eastern beaches and the cooler villages above them. Autumn brings apples, walnuts and the year’s tsipouro distilling. Winter brings snow on Mount Pelion and the small ski station at Agriolefkes. Pelion is unusual in being worth a visit at any time of year. Stay at least three nights, or four if you intend to walk.

House Notes

  1. The Moutzouris

    The Moutzouris is the narrow-gauge steam train of Pelion, running 15 kilometres on one of the world’s narrowest tracks (60 centimetres) from Ano Lechonia up to Milies in 90 minutes, with a 15-minute stop at Ano Gatzea. The line’s engineer was Evaristo de Chirico, father of the painter Giorgio, who was born in Volos and drew his early imagery from the arched stone bridges his father built. The summer train leaves Ano Lechonia in the morning.

  2. The plane tree

    On the central square of Tsagarada at Agia Paraskevi stands the plane tree the village grew around: a trunk 15 metres round, around 1,000 years old and older than the 1719 church beside it. A marble column now carries the branches, because the village bell once hung from them and its weight pulled the limbs down. The cafés keep their tables in the shade beneath.

  3. Damouchari

    Damouchari, on the eastern coast at Mouresi, is the safest natural harbour on the eastern Pelion shore: two coves divided by a rocky peninsula where the ruins of a medieval castle still stand. The 19th-century customs house, the warehouses and the captains’ mansions date from the years when the Zagorian fleet sheltered here. The “Dancing Queen” sequence of the 2008 film Mamma Mia was shot on the jetty between the coves.

  4. The address

    The address is 12 Months Luxury Resort, on the green slopes above Tsagarada, built in the Pelion mountain style of stone, slate and timber and set in the dense forest on the east of the ridge. The thousand-year-old plane tree is on the next square down, and the kalderimi, the old stone-paved path, to Damouchari starts below the hotel. It is open all year, in a region where each season asks for a different kind of stay.

  5. The Zagora apple

    Mila Zagoras Piliou is the Starking Delicious apple grown high on the eastern side of the mountain at Zagora, Makrirahi and Pouri, registered under the European Commission’s protected designation. The Agricultural Cooperative of Zagora, founded in 1916, is one of the oldest cooperatives in Greece. It now packs 10,000 to 15,000 tonnes a year through one of the larger sorting houses in the Balkans.

  6. The Athanasakeion

    The Athanasakeion Archaeological Museum of Volos opened in 1909 in a neoclassical building that Alexios Athanassakis, a merchant of Portaria, paid for, built and gave to the state. The core of the collection is the Neolithic finds from Sesklo and Dimini, two prehistoric settlements just west of the city. The garden outside holds reconstructions of the Neolithic houses themselves.

  7. Trikeri

    Trikeri, at the southernmost tip of Pelion, was founded in the 17th century by islanders fleeing pirate raids, and by 1821 it held one of the largest merchant fleets in Greece. Sailing ships were built at the traditional shipyard at Agia Kyriaki, on the western edge of the settlement, which carries on the shipbuilding of the 18th and 19th centuries. Trikeri was designated a protected traditional village in 1967.

  8. Mylopotamos

    Mylopotamos lies 6 kilometres below Tsagarada on the open Aegean side: a double cove divided by a rock with a natural arch, through which the sea passes between the bays. One side is organised, with a beach bar, while the quieter side has a sea cave that keeps its shade through the middle of the day. A steep paved staircase leads down from the car park above; come early to claim the further cove.

  9. Kavouras

    Kavouras, on Hatziargyri Street in central Volos, is one of the oldest of the city’s tsipouradika, the places that serve tsipouro, a grape spirit, with small plates. It is an old-style kafenio, or coffee house, where the bottle is light and the plates come from the morning catch, at the quiet end of the long Volos lunch rather than in the line of tables at the harbour. It is the right introduction to the custom the city built its afternoons on.

  10. Iolcus

    Iolcus lies on the Volos Kastro hill, on the city’s western edge, below Mount Pelion at the head of the Pagasetic Gulf; Homer called it a well-built city with broad places. In legend, Jason and the 50 Argonauts set out from here on the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece. The Neolithic settlement of Dimini lies beside it on the same plain.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Agios Ioannis

    Agios Ioannis is the cosmopolitan resort of the east coast and the most popular beach on Pelion, with white pebbles under the deep green of the mountain on the open Aegean side of the peninsula. The beaches of Plaka and Papa Nero lie on either side of it. A yacht lies off the pebble beach, on the seaward side of the hook.

  2. Milina

    Milina is a village on the Pagasetic Gulf, on the peninsula’s inner side, looking across the water to the low island of Alatas. It has a mooring for any kind of boat, and the ruins of ancient Olizon, the city of Philoctetes, lie in the bay of Valtoudi beside it. A yacht lies off Milina among the gulf’s small islands.

  3. Afissos

    Afissos lies on the Pagasetic Gulf below the mountain villages, built like an amphitheatre and said to be more like an island than a mainland shore, with three beaches around it: Kallifteri, Lagoudi and Abovos. The Argonauts are said to have drunk from the stream that still crosses its square before they sailed for Colchis. A yacht lies off the terraced town on the gulf.

  4. Platanias

    Platanias is the fishing village at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, 60 kilometres down from Volos, where the hook curls back on itself. The plane trees and poplars it is named for come almost to the shore, and it is the base for the southern and eastern coasts of Pelion. A yacht lies off the little port at the end of the peninsula.

Mythology

  1. Achilles

    On Pelion, Peleus hands the baby Achilles to the centaur Chiron, who raises him on the mountain. Apollodorus says Chiron also gave the boy the name Achilles.

  2. Chiron

    Pindar places Chiron's cave and the house of his mother, Philyra, on Pelion. Jason is raised there, Achilles brings his first quarry to Chiron there, and Apollo entrusts the infant Asclepius to the Centaur on the mountain.

  3. Eris

    Mount Pelion was the setting of the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis. In the Epitome, Eris answers being left out by throwing the golden apple that begins the dispute judged by Paris.

  4. Hector

    The spear Achilles kills Hector with is named as Pelian ash, cut on the peak of Pelion and given by the centaur Chiron to Achilles’s father Peleus. It is the same spear Patroclus left behind when he borrowed the rest of Achilles’s armour.

  5. Jason

    Pindar has Jason say he grew up in the cave of the centaur Chiron on Pelion. Apollodorus sets his return to Iolcos on the plain below the mountain, where he crosses the river Anaurus, loses a sandal in the current and, without knowing it, fulfils an oracle that had warned King Pelias to beware such a man.

  6. Mount Pelion

    In Pindar, Mount Pelion is the mountain of Chiron, where Jason, Asclepius and Achilles are trained. Apollodorus and Euripides also set the marriage of Peleus and Thetis on its slopes, with the gods, Centaurs and Nereids as guests.

  7. Nereus

    On Pelion, the gods celebrate the marriage of Nereus’s daughter Thetis to Peleus. The François Vase, from the sixth century BC, shows Nereus and Doris, labelled by name, in the procession to the wedding, with Nereus turning to point the way.

  8. Patroclus

    The spear Patroclus could not take into battle was Pelian ash from the peak of Pelion, given by the centaur Chiron to Peleus, and Homer says no Achaean but Achilles could wield it. The healing Patroclus used on the wounded Eurypylus came from the same mountain, learned from Achilles, who was taught by Chiron.

  9. Peleus

    On Pelion, Peleus holds Thetis while she changes shape and marries her there in front of the gods. Chiron gives him an ash spear at the wedding and later takes in the baby Achilles on the same mountain.

  10. The Centaurs

    Pindar has Centaurus mate with the mares grazing the foothills of Pelion to father the Centaurs, and Apollodorus makes the mountain Chiron's own home until the Lapiths drive him out to Malea, a different mountain at the southern tip of the Peloponnese.

  11. The Iliad

    Achilles’s spear comes off this mountain, the Pelian ash that the centaur Chiron gave to his father Peleus from the peak of Pelion. In Book 16 Patroclus puts on Achilles’s armour but leaves the spear, because no other Greek could wield it.

  12. The Lapiths

    The Iliad says Peirithous drove the Centaurs from Mount Pelion to the land of the Aethices. Apollodorus tells the same move through Chiron, who lives at Malea because the Lapiths drove him from Pelion.

  13. The Nereids

    Euripides places the 50 daughters of Nereus in a circle dance on Pelion, at the divine wedding of their sister Thetis to Peleus.

  14. The Voyage of the Argo

    Before the Argo leaves the beach at Pagasae, below Pelion, Apollonius has Jason build an altar to Apollo by the sea and pray for the voyage. As the ship pulls away, Chiron comes down from the mountain to the shore to wave goodbye, his wife holding up the baby Achilles for Peleus to see, and Euripides opens his play Medea by wishing the pines of Pelion had never been cut down for the oars of the Argonauts.

  15. Thetis

    On Pelion, Peleus holds the shape-changing Thetis after Chiron tells him how to stop her escape. Their wedding follows on the mountain, where Chiron gives an ash spear and Poseidon the immortal horses Balius and Xanthus.