Sifnos · Things to do
Beaches, trails, festivals, food and wine: the experiences that make this island its own.
Experiences
Ideas for every kind of day, from a lazy swim to a full-day hike.
Food & wine
On Sunday, order the chickpeas that spent the night in a clay skepastaria in a brushwood-fired oven, soft and sweet with onion and olive oil. In summer some tavernas make them every day.
Tavernas across the island
Culture
Visit one of the island's 15 or so workshops to watch mastelo and revithada pots being thrown, and the flaroi, the clay chimney pots of the island's roofs, then take a pot home.
Kamares, Vathi, Platis Gialos, Artemonas, Cherronisos
Hike
Pick one of the 19 signposted routes: Apollonia to Kastro in about an hour, Faros to Chrysopigi along the shore, or the long climb to Profitis Ilias through the juniper. Spring and autumn are best, when the hills are full of herbs and wild flowers.
All over the island
Festival
After vespers on a saint's eve, sit down at the long shared tables for revithada and lamb with macaroni, with a violin and a lute playing. Everyone is fed, visitors included. Ask in a kafeneio which chapel is celebrating.
Remote chapels, mostly autumn to spring
Festival
Since 2003 volunteers, locals and visitors alike, hike out to the ancient towers and at 7 in the evening signal across the island from one to the next with smoke and mirrors, then gather for music and talks. Anyone can join.
Ancient towers across the island, the eve of the Day of the Holy Spirit
Beach
Walk down the steps from Kastro to the little chapel on its rock and dive into deep blue water from the rocks.
Kastro
Hike
Follow the path up to the walled monastery on the top of the island. On a clear day you can count the Cyclades around you.
The highest peak, ≈ 680 m
Nature
The white Cycladic dovecotes, with their stone patterns of triangles and diamonds, stand in the terraced fields below the villages. The paths take you right past them.
The valleys around Apollonia and Artemonas
Culture
Walk up to the old windmills above the village at sunset for the view over the villages to Kastro and the sea.
Artemonas
Festival
The island's greatest feast. On the eve the icon arrives by ferry at the rock, there is vespers, a shared dinner and an all-night vigil, and next day the icon goes by caique to Kastro and in procession to Apollonia.
Chrysopigi, forty days after Easter
Festival
The Cycladic Gastronomy Festival 'Nikolaos Tselementes' invites cooks from across the Cyclades to cook their islands' recipes and set a table for every visitor, with exhibitions, music and dancing.
Sifnos, three days in September
Only on Sifnos
Things even seasoned islomaniacs rarely know about this island.
Revithada is chickpeas, onion and olive oil, left overnight in a lidded clay pot called a skepastaria in an oven fired with brushwood, and eaten after church on Sunday. Mastelo, lamb or goat in red wine and dill, goes into its own pot of the same name for Easter. The man who taught all of Greece to cook, Nikolaos Tselementes, was born in Exambela in 1878; his cookbook of 1930 gave the country béchamel and the modern moussaka.
The island's fireproof clay, weathered out of its schist, made its potters so famous that 'a Sifnian' became another word for a potter. They carried the trade to other islands and to Attica, setting up whole workshop quarters in Marousi, Chalandri and Agia Paraskevi. At home they worked by the sea all week, slept at the kilns and walked back to their villages on Saturday afternoon. Look up at the roofs: the clay chimney pots, the flaroi, are theirs. About 15 workshops still fire today.
Archaeologists have recorded 77 round stone towers on the island, about 8 m across and mostly from the 6th to the 3rd century BC, more than one for every square kilometre and more than on any other Aegean island. They guarded the mines and fields and passed signals between the hilltop citadels. Every year since 2003, on the eve of the Day of the Holy Spirit, volunteers hike out to the ruins at 7 in the evening and signal from tower to tower once more, with smoke and mirrors.
On the eve of Ascension Day the icon of Chrysopigi, the island's patron, is carried from the house of the family hosting the feast to Agios Georgios in Kamares. Then the host and the priests board the regular ferry from Piraeus, which that one day adds the rock of Chrysopigi to its route. Pilgrims go by road. Next morning a caique takes the icon to Seralia below Kastro, and it is walked through the villages to Apollonia, where next year's host receives it.
Each village feast is paid for by one person or family, the panigyras: the whitewash, the priests, the violinist and lute player, the wine and dinner for everyone. In return the saint's icon lives in their house all year. Some churches have waiting lists years long. After vespers the long tables are laid with revithada and lamb in tomato with macaroni, cooked on raised hearths, and set again and again until everyone has eaten.
Sifnians sing their kalanda, the house-to-house carols, on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day to a Byzantine tune, and every year new verses are written about the year's news, local and world. In February the municipality judges the best of them, and in doing so keeps old words of the island's dialect alive.
Kastro has no separate fortification. Its outer ring of three-storey houses, each only about 30 m², turns blank walls to the sea, and the way in was through six covered gateway passages called lotzies. By the early 17th century some 5,000 people were packed onto the rock, on a hill that also carries the white-marble walls of the ancient acropolis.
Ioannis Gryparis, born here in 1870, wrote the sonnets of Scarabs and Terracottas and translated Aeschylus and Sophocles into modern Greek; an August evening of readings, the Grypareia, is held in his honour. Aristomenis Provelengios of Exambela made the first Greek verse Faust, helped found the Academy of Athens and came home to write a book of poems called Chrysopigi.
Stone and marble paths, the oldest going back to the third millennium BC, link every village, chapel and bay; 19 routes are signposted as the Sifnos Trails. They pass wells, threshing floors, lime kilns and dovecotes, and cross the island's Natura 2000 reserve, about 20 km² from Profitis Ilias to the west coast, where the protected juniper is called fida in the local dialect.
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