Paros
— — the white the marble holds before sunset.
Not only on a wall.
“Paros is a marble island. The same white that built the Venus de Milo still works through the houses of Parikia and the fishing lanes of Naoussa. Bougainvillea spills over the lintels. The afternoon meltemi comes up hard from the north, and by evening the harbours go quiet and the ouzo glasses come out. — from the studio
Paros, 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.
Paros is a Cycladic island of about 165 square kilometres in the central Aegean, west of Naxos across a strait crossed by car ferry in under an hour. Its capital, Parikia, faces the western harbour; the second town, Naoussa, holds a fishing port on the north coast. The interior rises to Profitis Ilias at 771 metres, with stone-walled villages — Lefkes, Marpissa, Prodromos — strung along the older inland roads. Ferries reach the island from Piraeus in roughly four hours, and a small airport handles regional flights from Athens.
Parian marble is the reason the island has a name beyond its size. The quarries at Marathi, three kilometres east of Parikia, were worked from at least the seventh century BC and produced the translucent, fine-grained stone used for the Venus de Milo, the Hermes of Praxiteles, and much of the Acropolis sculpture. The marble is unusually pure; the best grade, lychnites, was mined by lamplight in underground galleries. The galleries are still visible, gated and unlit, and the white dust of the island still works its way into the whitewash on every wall in Parikia.
The Panagia Ekatontapiliani, the Church of a Hundred Doors, stands a block back from the Parikia waterfront. Its core dates to the fourth century and is one of the oldest continuously used churches in Greece; the present cruciform basilica was rebuilt under Justinian in the sixth century. Entry is free; modest dress is expected. Most ferries arrive at the Parikia port a five-minute walk away, so the church is the first thing a visitor sees stepping off the boat. The interior is cool and dim, with a marble iconostasis carved from local stone.