Naxos Island
— — a marble doorway open to the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest island in the Cyclades, with a marble doorway standing alone on a small islet off the port — all that was finished of a temple to Apollo, twenty-five hundred years ago. Behind the harbour the old town climbs in white cubes to a Venetian castle. The interior rises to Mount Zas, the highest peak in the chain. The light off the sea passes through the Portara and keeps going. from the studio
Naxos Island, 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.
Naxos is the largest of the Cyclades, in the central Aegean about 190 kilometres southeast of Piraeus, with a land area of 430 square kilometres and a population of around 20,000. Its interior rises to Mount Zas at 1,004 metres, the highest summit in the Cyclades, named for Zeus, who Greek tradition held was raised in a cave on its flank. The island has been continuously inhabited since the early Cycladic period and was, in the sixth century BCE, one of the wealthiest of the Greek islands.
The Portara — a single marble doorway about six metres tall, standing on the islet of Palatia at the entrance to Chora harbour — is all that was finished of a temple to Apollo begun around 530 BCE under the tyrant Lygdamis. Work stopped when Lygdamis fell; the rest of the temple was never built. The doorway is cut from four enormous blocks of local Naxian marble, the same fine-grained white stone the island exported across the Greek world for sculpture, including the early kouroi of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.
Ferries from Piraeus reach Naxos in roughly three and a half hours by high-speed and five to six hours by conventional ferry; Naxos Island National Airport handles domestic flights from Athens. May through early October is the dependable season; the meltemi wind cools the afternoons of July and August. The Portara is a fifteen-minute walk from the port and is the classic sunset stop. Plaka and Agios Prokopios, on the western coast south of Chora, hold the longest of the island's sand beaches.