Zagori
Overview
Zagori is where the mainland keeps its best houses, and a great many people who have been to Greece a dozen times have never been.
Forty-six stone villages lie scattered across the slopes below Mount Tymfi, built by a people who bought their autonomy from the Ottomans and spent the proceeds of a merchant diaspora on their houses. The result is a vernacular of grey slate and dressed stone — walled courtyards, flagged squares, roofs laid like fish scales — unlike anything else in the country. UNESCO inscribed the whole cultural landscape in 2023.
Beneath the villages the Vikos gorge cuts a thousand metres into the limestone, and the Voidomatis comes out of the foot of it running clear enough to read the riverbed through. The old mule roads are still carried over the ravines on single- and double-arched packhorse bridges — Kokkori, Kalogeriko, Misios — thrown up by village benefactors who put their names on them and left them there. At Vradeto a stone stair of eleven hundred steps climbs the cliff face; until 1973 it was the only way into the village.
The archontika, the merchants' mansions, are what one stays in now — restored slowly, and mostly by people who came back. Papigo, Aristi and Monodendri hold the best of them, and the tables inside them have become quietly serious about what grows on the mountain. Come in autumn when the beech turns and the gorge runs at its clearest, or in late spring. High summer is the one season it does not want. Fly to Ioannina; the last hour is switchbacks, and it ought to be.
House Notes
The address
Aristi Mountain Resort sits above the village of Aristi, the work of Vassilis Iosifidis, whose vision for it dates to 1999 and who built in local stone and timber so the buildings read as village. Its kitchen, Salvia, is named for the sage that grows on these slopes; Yiannis Liokas cooks Epirot recipes out of the resort's own glass greenhouse — spinach and endive through winter, tomatoes and basil in the warm months.
Mikro Papigo
Mikro Papigo 1700 sits on the slope of Mikro Papigo — seven buildings, 18 rooms and suites, and a spa with hammam, sauna and pool that has no equal in these mountains. Its kitchen, Veranda at 1700, cooks from the property's own organic farm. Ask for the mini suite with the fireplace; the stone holds the cold long past the turning of the beech.
Behind the façades
Kipi Suites, in the village of Kipi, was made from two Zagori houses of 1850, with three buildings added behind the old façades. Every room and suite has one or two open fireplaces, and the view runs across to Mount Mitsikeli. This is the low, green end of Zagori — half an hour from Ioannina, and the right base for a guest who wants the bridges without the altitude.
The dragon lake
Drakolimni lies at 2,050 metres on Tymfi, under Astraka and Ploskos, and holds alpine newts — which the villagers took for small dragons, and named the lake after. It is roughly five hours up from Papigo. Break the walk at the Astraka hut, put up in 1966 by the Alpine Club of Ioannina at 1,950 metres in the col: 51 bunks, open May through October.
The rock pools
The Rogovo stream has cut the limestone at Papigo into a chain of basins — the ovires, as the villagers call them — at around 980 metres. The water runs clear and cold. Go early. By mid-morning in summer the pools belong to whoever arrived first, and there is no arrangement that changes it.
Agia Paraskevi
The monastery of Agia Paraskevi hangs on the lip of the Vikos gorge, a quarter of an hour on foot from Monodendri. Michael Therianos, a local voevoda, built it around 1413 in thanks for his daughter's recovery, and had himself painted on the north wall with his wife and children. Past the walls a ledge carries on along the cliff to the caves where hermits sheltered under the Ottomans.
The looms
The Rizarios Handicraft School has taught weaving and embroidery in Monodendri since 1979, and its graduates still work the traditional looms in the shop on the village square, where the cloth is sold. The Rizarios Exhibition Centre beside it occupies the Pantazi mansion, built around 1900 — elaborate stonework, high stone enclosure, paved courtyards — and has hung photography there since 2000.
The Vikos doctors
Koukouli holds the museum of flora and fauna, where Kostas Lazaridis left the herbarium he made from the gorge — 1,240 plant species, drawn from 96 of the world's 149 plant families. These were the working materials of the vikogiatroi, the doctors of Vikos, who made their medicines from what grew on the walls below. Open Wednesday to Sunday.
The Voidomatis, by raft
Trekking Hellas runs the 6.7-kilometre descent out of their Ioannina base, passing the arched bridge of Klidonia, and they run it in every month — the Voidomatis does not have a season. Take it as a float rather than a run: no technical water, and the gorge walls closing quietly behind you.
The mushrooms
Kanela & Garyfallo, in Vitsa, is a restaurant given over to mushrooms — Vasilis Katsoupas builds nearly the whole card around the wild kinds gathered on these slopes, macrolepiota among them. The room is a stone house of a hundred years that once served as a film set. It is the one table in Zagori worth the drive from wherever a guest happens to be staying.