Navagio
— — the freighter the sea decided to keep.
Not only on a wall.
“A pale crescent of pebble beach on the northwest coast of Zakynthos, walled in by chalk cliffs that drop straight to a turquoise cove. The rusted hull of the MV Panagiotis has lain on the sand since 1980, when the freighter ran aground in a storm and was abandoned where it fell. The beach is reachable only by boat from Porto Vromi. From the studio, a place we know by the colour the sea turns when it has limestone underneath it. from the studio
Navagio, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Navagio, sometimes called Shipwreck Beach, is a small cove on the northwest coast of the Ionian island of Zakynthos, in the Greek prefecture of the same name. The beach is enclosed on three sides by sheer chalk-and-limestone cliffs that rise roughly 200 metres above the waterline, with no overland path down to the sand. Access is by sea only, from the small harbour of Porto Vromi about a 25-minute boat ride to the south. A clifftop viewing platform on the road from Anafonitria gives the well-known overhead photograph of the wreck and the cove.
The water in the cove holds a pale milky turquoise that does not occur on most Greek beaches. The colour comes from limestone particles eroded from the surrounding cliffs and suspended in the shallow water, which scatter the shorter wavelengths of sunlight much like rock flour in a glacial lake. Visibility in the cove regularly exceeds 20 metres in calm conditions. The same chemistry, on a smaller scale, gives the Blue Caves on the same coastline their colour; the wider Ionian on either side of Zakynthos is darker, more ordinary Mediterranean blue.
The wreck itself is the MV Panagiotis, a Greek-flagged coastal freighter that ran aground on the beach in October 1980 in heavy weather and was abandoned where it lay. Local accounts vary on the cargo and the circumstances; the most widely repeated version describes a contraband run intercepted by the navy and driven onto the sand. The hull has rusted in place for over forty years and is now a brittle skeleton. After a cliff collapse in 2022, Greek authorities restricted access to the beach itself for safety; the clifftop viewpoint remains open in season.