A Small-Group Day Trip from Ammoudi Bay, Twenty Years Back in Time

Thirassia day trip: the timing is the whole point

The boat goes out of Ammoudi at 12:15 and comes back around half past five, which means it takes the middle of the day off your hands.

Late September isn’t August, and the 24th isn’t a heavy cruise ship day, so Oia’s main lane may be slightly less shoulder-to-shoulder. But it’s still the high season, and the village fills up fast; the hours between noon and five are the ones you’d look back on and wonder where they went. Those are the very hours you’d spend across the caldera, where only a couple of hundred people live, and you’d be back with the whole evening still in front of you, just in time for a Greek music night at Besalou restaurant in Oia.

I’ve spent most of this summer telling people to go inland when the sun is at its worst. This is the same thought, carried over to our “little sister” island.

Why go on a Thirassia day trip, from my point of view

I saw it through photographs before I ever went there.

The photographer Vangelis Paravas documented the deserted settlements of Thirassia—Agrilia first, then Kera—and his pictures are why the island got into my imagination to begin with. What they show isn’t ruins in the picturesque sense, but a whole new way of building. It still has students of architecture mesmerized into trying to retrace its deceptively simple shapes.

Kerà: Caves and Canaves

He describes Kerà as standing on the verge of the caldera with no electricity and no running water, the houses cut into the top layer of volcanic tephra that people here call àspa. Each household the same shape: the living part facing the caldera, and beside it the canava.

A canava space isn’t just a wine cellar. It’s the powerhouse of a Santorinian household, its whole family identity. Santorini’s volcanic soil yields distinctive grape varieties (such as Assyrtiko, Athiri, and Aidani), so owning a canava meant a grape grower possessed the complete knowledge and tools to craft, ferment, and age their own wines.

The thing about the name

Santorini is named after a church of Saint Irene, but which church?

One candidate is the basilica at Perissa, on Santorini itself. The other is Santa Irini on Thirassia, whitewashed, built in 1867, standing at the neck of the caldera where returning sailors would sight it and call out the name—National Geographic ran that story last month.

I’d rather give you the argument than pick a side, as I find the argument more interesting than a definitive answer. An island named for a saint, and two churches on two islands both insisting it had to be theirs.

Agrilia, and why it emptied out

Agrilia is a cave-house settlement set into a gorge. A few decades ago, up to seven hundred people lived there. It was an agricultural community, and what it grew went to the tomato paste factories on Santorini. When those closed after the Second World War the reason for the village went with them, and the earthquake of 1956 finished what was left.

I wrote recently about the exhibition at the tomato museum in Vlychada, which is about exactly that industry: the factories, the work, the people who did it. Agrilia is the other end of the same story. The museum has the machines. The gorge has the houses of the people who supplied them.

Manolas, where people still go about their daily lives

About 140 people, at the top of the cliff, facing us across the water.

It sits up there for a reason. The village was built at the island’s highest point to keep watch for pirates: Barbarossa’s ships were coursing these waters in the 1500s, and a village you can see from is a village you can run from. Now the same height is what gives you the view.

You reach it by road from Riva, or by two hundred and eighty stone steps up from Korfos. From up there, you see the whole rim at once.

Thirassia day trip: lunch time

The €50 covers the guided walk. Food and drink are not included—you pay for your own lunch on the day, so bring cash or a card and budget for a taverna meal on top. Saying that plainly because the listing mentions a seaside lunch and it’s easy to read that as part of the price.

Most day visitors to Thirassia eat at Korfos, where the boats come in, and go no further. The tavernas there sit right on the water and there’s nothing wrong with them.

Up in Manolas, though, there are two places worth the climb. Fyrgano is the village favorite, with a kitchen downstairs and a terrace above it, and salads made from the owner’s own garden. Panorama does something more ambitious—dishes like baby calamari moussaka, or sea bass with beetroot hummus and sea fennel from Tinos.

Thirassia day trip and Mikra Thira Winery

And if you want to drink something grown there, there’s Mikra Thira, near the hamlet of Potamos. It’s the first winery ever built on Thirassia, which tells you something on its own—three of Greece’s best-known winemakers, Vangelis Gerovassiliou, Vassilis Tsaktsarlis and Ioanna Vamvakouri, had the idea in 2007 and didn’t manage to build it until fifteen years later.

Ioanna Vamvakouri

Vamvakouri is the one making the wine. The vines here are ungrafted and most are over eighty years old, trained in koulouri, the ground-level baskets that curl the plant around its own fruit to keep the meltemi off it. Among the Assyrtiko there are old Athiri and Aidani vines mixed in, and she says they work the way roses do in a vineyard—they catch disease before the rest of the planting does, so the vineyard tells you something is wrong while there’s still time.

I like that as a way of thinking about the place: an island where the old things left standing turn out to be the useful ones.

Two other things worth knowing about Thirassia

The pumice quarried on Thirassia went into the Suez Canal; the mines are disused now and you walk past them along the hiking route.

And then there’s the church the islanders call the Mexican Church, for its peach and yellow paint. Where can you find it?

Come along to find out!

It’s just been in National Geographic

National Geographic Traveler ran a piece on Thirassia on 8 August this year, calling it Greece’s best-kept secret. It’s worth reading—it covers Santa Irini, the wineries, and the hiking—though it’s worth knowing it was produced with support from a hotel on the island, Marketing Greece, and a ferry company, which is disclosed at the foot of the article.

What a feature like that means, of course, is that the quiet has a clock on it. Not this year and probably not next. But the phrase “best-kept secret” in a magazine with that reach is the beginning of the end of the thing it’s describing, and everyone on the island knows it.

Go now, is what I’d say.

Thirassia Day Trip: Frequently Asked Questions