Stories

Passage of the day

Just as the earliest tinges of the dawn flushed the eastern sky and turned the pillared Parthenon to a broken harp hung in the pearly horizon

Mark Twain · The Innocents Abroad

The mansion's street front on Omirou, white and honey-coloured stonework with green panelled doors and louvred shutters, potted olive trees along the pavement, the lane falling away to the right

EstatesSyros

A tailor’s son built it in 1874, and six rooms now hold its frescoes

A businessman born on Syros built the house in 1874. A hotelier bought it in 2018, kept the original architectural elements and uncovered the frescoes, among them a Hermes, and opened six rooms.

4 October 2026

Aerial view of the house on an Antiparos headland at sunset, two stone and white volumes set apart with a long dark water channel running down the slope between them to a stone-walled pavilion

EstatesAntiparos

Peninsula, the Antiparos house Iasson Tsakonas kept for himself

4 October 2026

Three whitewashed cubic volumes standing in a row on a dry Tinian hillside, dry grass in the foreground and a terraced hill scattered with white houses behind

EstatesTinos

Three villas sunk into the rock at Agios Fokas

4 October 2026

Low villas of rough local stone stepping down a dry hillside above the sea at sunset, their flat roofs level with the scrub and a dirt path running between them

EstatesMilos

Seven stone villas above the fishing village of Skinopi

4 October 2026

Architect's visualisation of a curved white terrace along an infinity pool, with a dry-stone wall and arched openings on one side and a flat white volume above the sea

EstatesAmorgos

The Eye, the Amorgos house that takes its white volume from Chozoviotissa

4 October 2026

The lit stone residences of Themonies on the slope below Chora, Folegandros, with the Monastery of Panaghia on the ridge above the town and the Aegean beyond at dusk

EstatesFolegandros

Five stone residences above Chora, in a farm complex that kept its threshing floor

4 October 2026

A long infinity pool on a stone-paved terrace running out towards open sea, with a row of grey sun loungers under woven reed parasols along one side and dry-stone walls behind

EstatesSifnos

Verina Astra, the house at the end of the Poulati road

4 October 2026

Three whitewashed buildings standing around a long rectangular pool, with sun loungers and an umbrella on grey stone paving and a bare brown hillside rising behind

EstatesSifnos

Verina Villa, let whole on the sand at Vathi

4 October 2026

An aerial view over Xinara House: walled gardens, olive trees and terraced vegetable plots below a granite outcrop, with the village's blue-domed church and bell tower to the right

EstatesTinos

The bishop’s house at Xinara, brought back by the marble workers of Tinos

4 October 2026

Painted blue tables and chairs on a stone terrace beside a glass wall, a shell-set balustrade beyond them, with the beach, a palm and the bay behind

GastronomyIos

At CHES on Ios, a nine-course menu drawn from the Cycladic islands

4 October 2026

The dining room at Deka Trapezia, white marble tables and spindle-back wooden chairs set before a pale plaster wall with three arched niches of ceramics and a slatted rack of wooden letters.

GastronomyThessaloniki

Ten tables in Thessaloniki, and a menu called The Cook’s Prayer

4 October 2026

Rows of vines on a sloping block at Ktima Gerovassiliou, with olive groves, ploughed fields and cypresses beyond, and the Thermaic Gulf along the horizon.

GastronomyThessaloniki

Ktima Gerovassiliou grew a hectare or two at a time

4 October 2026

A round marble table laid with chopsticks, napkins and glasses in a seafront garden, with tamarisk trees, black rattan chairs and moored sailing boats beyond.

GastronomyParos

A garden by the sea on Paros, and Nobu Matsuhisa’s third Greek room

The third Matsuhisa in Greece sits in a Mediterranean garden on Piperi Beach, five minutes’ walk from Naoussa. Its season runs from mid-June to mid-September, and the kitchen is the Japanese and Peruvian one Nobu Matsuhisa built.

4 October 2026

The double-height dining room seen from the mezzanine, with a brass sputnik chandelier over round tables and tall windows opening onto the Thermaikos Gulf.

GastronomyThessaloniki

Olympos Naoussa is open again on the Thessaloniki seafront

A dining room that fed Thessaloniki’s professional and political class closed in the mid-1990s. The 1993 heritage listing on the building is why it came back by salvage and replica rather than by redesign.

4 October 2026