Zagori
Overview
Zagori is where the Greek mainland keeps its best houses. A great many people who have been to Greece a dozen times have never been there.
There are 46 stone villages scattered across the slopes below Mount Tymfi. The people who built them bought their autonomy from the Ottomans and spent the earnings of a merchant diaspora on their houses. The result is a local style of grey slate and dressed stone, with walled courtyards, flagged squares and roofs laid like fish scales, unlike anything else in the country. UNESCO inscribed the whole cultural landscape in 2023.
Below the villages the Vikos gorge cuts 1,000 metres into the limestone. The Voidomatis comes out of its foot running so clear that you can read the riverbed through the water. The old mule roads still cross the ravines on single- and double-arched packhorse bridges, among them Kokkori, Kalogeriko and Misios. Village benefactors built them, put their names on them and left them there. At Vradeto a stone stair of 1,100 steps climbs the cliff face. Until 1973 it was the only way into the village.
Visitors now stay in the archontika, the merchants’ mansions, restored slowly and mostly by people who came back. Papigo, Aristi and Monodendri have the best of them, and the tables inside have become 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 that does not suit it. Fly to Ioannina. The last hour is switchbacks, as it ought to be.
House Notes
The address
Aristi Mountain Resort sits above the village of Aristi. Vassilis Iosifidis conceived it in 1999 and built it in local stone and timber so that the buildings read as part of the village. Its restaurant, Salvia, is named for the sage that grows on these slopes, and Yiannis Liokas cooks Epirot recipes from the resort’s own glass greenhouse: spinach and endive through winter, tomatoes and basil in the warm months.
Mikro Papigo
Mikro Papigo 1700 stands on the slope of Mikro Papigo, with seven buildings, 18 rooms and suites, and a spa with a hammam (a steam bath), sauna and pool. Its restaurant, 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 after the beech leaves turn.
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. Kipi 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, the dragon lake, lies at 2,050 metres on Tymfi, under Astraka and Ploskos. It holds alpine newts, which the villagers took for small dragons and named the lake after. The walk up from Papigo takes roughly 5 hours; break it at the Astraka hut, built in 1966 by the Alpine Club of Ioannina at 1,950 metres in the col, the pass between the peaks, with 51 bunks, open from May to October.
The rock pools
The Rogovo stream has cut the limestone at Papigo into a chain of basins at around 980 metres, which the villagers call the ovires. The water runs clear and cold. Go early: by mid-morning in summer the pools belong to whoever arrived first, and no arrangement changes that.
Agia Paraskevi
The monastery of Agia Paraskevi hangs on the edge of the Vikos gorge, 15 minutes on foot from Monodendri. Michael Therianos, a local voevoda, or governor, built it around 1413 in thanks for his daughter’s recovery, and had himself painted on the north wall with his wife and children. Beyond the walls a ledge runs on along the cliff to the caves where hermits sheltered under Ottoman rule.
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 next door is in the Pantazi mansion, built around 1900 with elaborate stonework, a high stone enclosure and paved courtyards, and has shown photography there since 2000.
The Vikos doctors
Koukouli holds the museum of flora and fauna, where Kostas Lazaridis left his herbarium, a collection of dried plants from the gorge: 1,240 plant species 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. The museum opens Wednesday to Sunday.
The Voidomatis, by raft
Trekking Hellas runs the 6.7-kilometre raft descent of the Voidomatis from its base in Ioannina, past the arched bridge of Klidonia, and runs it in every month; the river has no season. Take it as a float rather than a run: there is no technical water, meaning no rapids that need skill, and the gorge walls close in behind you.
The mushrooms
Kanela & Garyfallo, in Vitsa, is a restaurant given over to mushrooms. Vasilis Katsoupas builds nearly the whole menu around the wild kinds gathered on these slopes, macrolepiota, the parasol mushroom, among them. The dining room is a 100-year-old stone house that once served as a film set.