Apollonia, the heart of Sifnos

Apollonia is not one old village but several. Hamlets grew up on the hills in the middle of the island and slowly ran into one another, so that today Apollonia, Ano and Kato Petali, Katavati and Exambela feel like one long white village, with Artemonas just beyond. The name is taken from the god Apollo. Many islanders still use its other name, Stavri.

For most of its history Sifnos was governed from Kastro, the walled village on the east coast. In 1836, a few years after Greece became independent, the capital moved inland to Apollonia: safer from the sea, closer to the fields and at the crossing of the island's paths. It has stayed the capital ever since.

The village is built the Cycladic way: low white houses with flat roofs that once fed rainwater into cisterns, outside steps, courtyards with jasmine and bougainvillea, and lanes paved in stone and marble with the joints painted white. On the roofs stand flaroi, the clay chimney pots of the island's potters. Agios Spyridon, the island's cathedral, sits right on the Steno. Each Ascension Day the icon of Chrysopigi ends its procession around the villages here, and is handed to the family that will host its feast the following year.

Iroon Square, the square of the heroes, is the centre of village life, with its war memorial and the Folklore Museum. The museum was set up by the teacher and folklorist Antonis Troullos, and keeps the island's old costumes, embroidery and lace, tools for the fields, beehives, pottery and weapons, with photographs of Sifnos before the roads. On nearby Rabagas Square stands the bust of Kleanthis Triantafyllos, known as Rabagas, the satirical poet and journalist born in Apollonia in 1850.

Food is serious here. Nikolaos Tselementes was born in 1878 in Exambela, just south of Apollonia, and his cookbook of 1930 became the kitchen bible of Greece. On Saturday nights families still take clay pots of chickpeas to the wood oven, to eat as revithada after church on Sunday. At Christmas the square of Kato Petali becomes a small Christmas village, and on an August Saturday the Grypareia, an evening of poetry for the island's poet Ioannis Gryparis, is held in a courtyard on the path from Apollonia up to Ano Petali.