family’s old stone house is the Costas Tsoclis Museum, a
whitewashed former school with an extension made of
local stone, which displays dozens of the artist’s works.
Visitors to the museum (open June through September)
are greeted in the front courtyard by Tsoclis’s St. George
and the Dragon, a multipart sculpture in which the saint is
represented in a life-size wall relief and the beast by a six-
meter-long snaking metal tail. Despite being an atheist,
Tsoclis—who is in his late 80s and continues to make new
work—says he uses Christian symbols because “they
carry the hopes of millions and millions of souls.”TINOS HAS ATTRACTED artists since
a nt iqu it y, t h a n k s i n pa r t to its fa mou s m a rble qua r r ies.
On the outskirts of the lovely village of Pyrgos, the sleek
stone-and-glass Museum of Marble Crafts leads visitors
through exhibits ranging from how the stone is quarried
to how it’s carved. More interesting still is to stroll
through Pyrgos and take in all the marble sculpture
dotting the streets, from busts to bell towers, and theabout the island, Tama, which means “votive” in Greek. “I
have been to so many beautiful places, but sometimes
there is a voice that whispers to you that you belong to a
place,” she said, describing the hold Tínos has on her.
“Other Greek islands are only about the beach, but here it’s
also about the incredible villages you find inland.”
One morning I followed Tsoclis in my car out of the
main port—also called Tínos—away from the streets
lined with tourist shops selling religious paraphernalia.
Taking a narrow, winding road, we headed up into the
hills, toward the village of Kampos, where her father, the
renowned artist Costas Tsoclis, and her mother, Eleni,
spend every summer. It was early April, and the rocky
fields we drove by were covered in a haze of green grass
and dotted with wildflowers—in contrast to the summer,
when the land is dry and barren. We kept climbing
upward, and occasionally I would spot a dovecote built into
a slope or ravine. The island is home to hundreds of these
stone towers, with fanciful geometric patterns cut into
their façades, some meticulously maintained and painted
bright white, others crumbling. They were built by the
Venetians—who ruled Tínos for more than 500 years,
ending in 1715—and were used to raise pigeons for meat
and fertilizer made from the birds’ droppings.
When we arrived at Kampos, we parked at the edge of
the village and entered on foot (almost all the villages on
Tínos are car-free, because the ancient streets are too
narrow). In the distance we could see craggy Mount
Exomvourgo, the island’s highest peak. Next to the Tsoclis
TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM / OCTOBER 2017 33
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Looking out over the
rooftops of whitewashed buildings in Pyrgos;
in the village of Pyrgos, streets are paved
with marble from the nearby quarries the
area has been famous for since antiquity;
the bell tower at St. Paraskevi Church, in
Pyrgos; a plate of sardines at Tarsanas, a
taverna in the Tínos harbor.