Pyrgos, the village made of marble

There are quarries in the hills all around Pyrgos, of white marble and of the grey-green stone that Tinos is known for, and for centuries the men of the village have made their living from them. They became the most sought-after marble masons in Greece: carvers from Pyrgos and the villages around it made the iconostases, fountains, bell towers and gravestones of churches from Athens to Smyrna and Constantinople. In 2015 UNESCO added Tinian marble craftsmanship to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Officially the village is called Panormos, after the bay below, but everyone calls it Pyrgos, the tower. It climbs a slope in the empty, windy north-west of the island, Exomeria, with white houses, narrow lanes and blue doors under carved marble fanlights: half-moons of pierced stone over the doors, with birds, ships, cypresses and vases of flowers cut into them. The square has an old plane tree, a marble fountain and the cafés where the village sits in the evening.

The village has given Greece an unusual number of artists. The painter Nikiforos Lytras was born here, and so was Yannoulis Chalepas, the greatest Greek sculptor of the 19th century. Chalepas made the Sleeping Girl, the marble figure on a young woman's tomb in the First Cemetery of Athens, then lost his reason and spent years in an asylum on Corfu. When he came home to Pyrgos his mother, believing sculpture had driven him mad, destroyed what he made. He went on working in secret, and in old age made some of his finest work. His house, with his workshop and plaster models, is a small museum.

Below the village, the Museum of Marble Crafts, run by the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation, tells the whole story: the quarries, the tools, the way a block was cut out of the mountain and brought down, and the work of the craftsmen, with full-size models and carvings. The School of Fine Arts of Panormos still trains marble carvers, and on a walk through the lanes you hear chisels in the workshops.

Leave time for the cemetery at the edge of the village. Generations of carvers made the tombs of their own families here, and the result is a garden of white marble, carved with care for people they knew. Then walk or drive down to the harbour of Panormos for fish by the water, and come back up for the evening in the square.