Sifnos, Greece
Best-kept secret of the Cycladic Islands
“Please stop writing about Sifnos so a million people don’t go there,” pleaded my friend. But of the 24 Greek islands I’ve visited, Sifnos remains my favorite and is the best-kept secret of the Cycladic Islands.
WHY SIFNOS?
FOOD
It’s home to the Cycladic Gastronomy Festival held every September. The three-day event celebrates the best of Greek cooking. Nikolaos Tselementes, a beloved old master of the cuisine, came from Sifnos. “Tselementes” is synonymous with “cookbook” in Greece.
POTTERY
The island is the epicenter for Greek pottery. An artisanal, artistic, and entrepreneurial community of Potters thrives on Sifnos.
HIKING TRAILS
With over 100 kilometers of well-marked trails, it has some of the largest trail networks in the Aegean. The views will make you fall in love with this gem of an island.
Sifnos Pottery
Abundant clay, water, and sunshine all helped make the Greek island of Sifnos a center of pottery in the Aegean. At its busiest, Sifnos boasted over 200 active pottery workshops. Now, there are less than 20 scattered across this Cycladic isle.
My two favorites are ATSONIOS in Vathi and LEMBESIS in Artemonas. Both studios create traditional and contemporary designs. I stumbled upon them during a sailing trip in 2017, and so loved their ceramics that I simply had to search them out again two years later.
ATSONIOS CERAMICS
Tucked away at one end of the small cove of Vathi Bay, Atsonios has been making pottery by hand since 1870. Before stainless steel cookware became popular, they supplied restaurants in Athens with their well-known ceramic pots and cookware.
Mr. Atsonios is a fourth-generation potter with a friendly, gentle demeanor, and he obliged us with a turn at the wheel. His English is sparse, but not his generosity and kindness. He lives with his son, daughter-in-law and a family of cats (I counted eight). I find his work simple, honest and substantive. I’m the proud owner of one of his cooking pots - put to good use at many family meals - as well as several coffee cups and a flower vase.
LEMBESIS POTTERY
I found the LEMBESIS workshop by accident. We were lost in Artemonis in 2017 when I saw a sign reading “κεραμικά”. I don’t read Greek but my one-track shopper’s mind quickly deciphered this as Keramika. Ceramics. Yasss!!! It was October, the end of the tourist seasons. We peeped into a closed shop and saw racks of blue and white hand-painted ceramics.
You should know that I’m a hopeless sucker for all things Blue and White. We wandered through the empty streets, shouting, “Yassas, yassas, is anybody there?” We found an open door leading to the Lembesis workshop and found grandmother Katerina Lembesis hand-painting a plate alongside her daughter-in-law, and son Niko.
The LEMBESIS signature motifs are inspired by land and sea. Elaborate in detail and yet so simple, the designed are infused with a childlike whimsy that makes me happy. What’s not to love? Two years later after I returned in 2019, I was saddened to learn that their matriarch Katerina passed that year. I’m grateful to own some pieces that she painted herself and new ones that are copies of her most popular designs.
We achored in the bay at Vathi for three days to shelter from the Meltemi winds that were too strong to sail in. We met an Englishman who was traveling alone. He came to Sifnos and never bothered to go elsewhere. He spent his days hiking around the island and evenings in a seaside taverna. At his recommendation, we set off on a nine-kilometer hike the following day from Vathi to Apollonia.
Sifnos Trails
The Pink line was our hiking route. This hike is aptly called “The Hidden Sides of Sifnos.”
The trails now used for hiking were the old donkey trails that connected the villages and farms before paved roads were built. We came across the small cave of Vougnou, the ruined monastery of Taxiarchis Skafis, the Mavro Chorio “Black Village”, olive groves, valleys and views of Milos, Kimolos and Polyaigos islands. In the course of our hike, we only met three other people walking in the opposite direction. We somehow magically felt that we had the island to ourselves.
Cycladic Gastronomy Festival
Every year, during the first two weeks of September, the Cultural Association of Sifnos, with the support of the Municipality of Sifnos and the Prefecture of South Aegean, organizes the three-day Cycladic Gastronomy Festival “Nikolas Tselementes.”
Held in the village of Artemonas, the festival gathers participants from over 15 different South Aegean islands to showcase their traditional recipes and specialties.
The idea of a three-day food fest on my favorite island is enough motivation to plan my next trip to Sifnos. Who’s with me?