Discovering the mountainous Aegina.

A tour of the unknown landscape of the Aegean land.

An initiation to the eerie stone beauty of the nature, the temples and the villages of Aegina, through paths and ancient routes.

Tzikides – Chrysoleontissa

Time without stops: 40min

(95% marked path, 5% road)

The Tzikides are 5.5 km away from town and are located on the road axis Lefki – Tzikides – Pachia Rachi – Anitsaio – Portes, around which most of the small villages of the mountainous Aegina are built. The fireplace in her house is the most common place in the mountainous area of the mountain range. Evangelia Gika’s house has been lit early. In the cages hanging from the ceiling the eight jugs are drinking and chirping. Her “palace” , a small one-storey 200 year old house, one of the 2-3 that remain from the old small settlement of Tzikides, built with cross dry stone, whitewashed, shines with cleanliness. We drink coffee , eat spoonfuls ( pancakes) and greet her because today the program provides for signposting on the classic route Tzikides – Chrysoleontissa. We follow for 250 m. the uphill road, passing through modern large houses of the last and permanent occupation of Aegina by the modern Athenians. We leave on our right a huge single-person structure, something like an international airport arrivals hall, and enter the path that runs parallel to a water pipe. After 35 min we reach the large threshing floor and  immediately we are in the garden of the historic monastery.

The Monastery of Chrysoleontissa

It is located in the center of the island, on a plateau unseen from the sea and is surrounded by rich vegetation with large holm oaks, oaks, cedars, chintros, they call them here, schinas, a few pines and olive trees.

The icon of the Virgin Mary, which according to tradition is the work of the Evangelist Luke, was brought to this place from Leontes, on the western coast, because of the fear of pirates. The monastery built in 1403 AD was destroyed by fire and in 1600-1614 AD the monks Arsenios and Makarios rebuilt it with the help of the Patriarch of Constantinople Timotheos and the monastery was declared a Stavropegic monastery. A new great fire in the 18^th century destroyed the monastery again, which was rebuilt in 1808, taking the form it has today. Of the original buildings of 1403, only the 18m high tower has survived, imposing and majestic, reminding us of the glorious past of this important Christian monument of Aegina.

The large paved courtyard with the beautiful cypress trees, the white cells and the two churches with the blue domes, give beauty to the eyes and peace to the soul. You should not miss to visit the huge well-built threshing floor, a real stone-built masterpiece built on a hill 3min. from the outer precinct.

The climb of 10min. to the nearby hill with the chapel of St. Andreas and the wonderful view is the necessary complement of our visit to the beautiful area of the monastery of Chrysoleontissa.

Kontos – Psachni – Vouno Dendrou – Monastery of Panagia Chrysoleontissa

Time without stops: 1 hour and 20 min

(90% on road, 10% on trail)

This route that we will describe to you on foot can also be done by car.  We, however, at a sufficiently early hour, leave the taxi in the sparsely populated Kontos, 5.5 km from the port, just opposite the new church of Agios Nektarios. In contrast to the humble monastery of St. Aegina, this huge church looks, according to the painter Minos Argyrakis, like a “fat flabby meteorite”. An expression of a modern temple concept and a certain commercial spirit that dominated Greece and destroyed cities, landscapes and villages. We ascend the asphalt road to Chrysoleontissa, and in 8 min., on the bend, we follow the path and the red marks of the Byzantine ruined cobblestone that appears now and then in our path. In 7 min. we meet the road again and immediately afterwards we pass in front of a large stone relief of the Virgin Mary with a beautiful iconostasis carved into the rock. Tradition says that this is where the monks who carried the icon of Chrysoleontissa from the seaside Leonti to the place where the monastery is today rested. From this height we have a beautiful view to the north of the hill of Paliachora, which was the capital of the island from the 10^th to the 19^th century AD.

A trip to this wonderful “Island Mystras” with its 38 Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches and a reading of Anna Maranti’s article in the 24th issue of Elliniko Panorama is a necessary complement to a tour of the mountainous Aegina.

We continue and in less than 5 minutes we leave the asphalt road at the closed bend and follow a narrow dirt road on the left for 200 m.

Small stone houses, 5-6 all and sundry, two threshing floors, a beautiful well-built oven, a large poplar tree and immortals around it, isolated, as they call them here, elm trees, olive trees and grills. We are in Psachni, one of the many stone-built corners of the magnificent Aegean nature, far from the busy streets of mass consumer tourism. The sun tries to find a way out between the clouds. It succeeds perfectly over Megara which makes it shimmer in the hazy landscape of Attica-Megara. Birds making odd dives lead us 100m to the east and a small pond emerges from behind the dry land. Stone cistern, open to the sky, in a spot of land that can collect rainwater or underground waterways. A water collector, an ancient structure, carved into the rock or built into the ground, called a “souvala” here in Aegina. Nearly 20 have been counted on the island with water and as many more dry from the passage of time.

Now the sun has found enough paths so we can see the bright corners of the coast of Attica, Piraeus and Athens with the southern suburbs beyond, Penteli and Hymettus. A strange image, with the eye swinging from the calm landscape of the measure and proportion of Psachni, to the undefined and boundlessly structured landscape of the basin …

The wood piled up by the door indicates that someone lives in this place. The sound of St. Nektarios’s bell mingles with the bells of the approaching herd of goats. Dimitrios Bogris is now the only inhabitant of Psachni and one of the few shepherds left on the island. He greets us politely and it doesn’t take long for the conversation to begin. He boasts about the terraces or stairs as they are called here, which are made of andesite, i.e. black stone or red stone, volcanic stones, resistant to weight and time. With these stones, large and small, the old people used to build the wall of the dry stone, to support the soil, to save the soil, to save it from the rains, to prevent it from sinking, because the rest would be stone and rock again and no bread. These ladders, which were spread over almost all the mountains of Aegina, yielded wheat, barley, lathuria, fava beans – peas and chickpeas, pitch for the animals, and also vines of sabbatianas and roydites. In other villages they had more lime trees and lower down, a few xinodendrons and chikoudia (wildflower trees). And cheeses were good, we made gheremezi (myzithra) and tsigara (feta cheese), and we had everything. There used to be a lot of us. In the late ’40s, ten of us kids went to school in Pahiorachi, an hour to go and an hour to come. But now I was left alone, how to keep the cattle when the grass is gone and the fodder is going uphill… Hard times for us shepherds … we are pulling hard.

Vouno Dendrou

We leave Psachni and Mr. Bogris and in 3 min. we return to the asphalt road. In 100 m. we follow the sign to Ag. Nikolaos on the right. Road only for 4×4, in 300 m. passes in front of the white Taxiarchis with the small cemetery of Psachni. 200 m further on, the detour leads in 3 min. to Agios Athanasios with a beautiful view of the Skotini gorge. The ruined houses down in the ravine are the long abandoned Freatsi. In the last 400 m of the dirt road we reach the chapel of Agios Nikolaos, which is built with black stone, but also with Aeginitic puri in its corners and in its orange windows. We follow the path and in 70 m, next to ruins, we see on the right a small souvala hidden in the bushes, which, from the stone pillar in the middle, we conclude that it may have been a shelter in the past.

We continue the path west and immediately afterwards we find ourselves on a large plateau with wide terraces overlooking Petrokaravos and Poros SE, Perdika, the island of Moni and the peninsula of Methana SW, and West Agistri with Metopi almost floating with its aerodynamic shape on the deep blue waters of the Saronic Gulf. The only large pine tree in the area is what remains of a large fire that burned a forest of cedars and pines. In 15 min. we return to the asphalt road, in 1 km. we are at the parking of the monastery and in 5 min. from there, following the wide, comfortable path, we reach the outer courtyard of Chrysoleontissa.

Chrysoleontissa – Pachia Rachi

Time without stops: 1 hour

(80% marked path, 20% asphalt road)

From the south door of the outer garden of the monastery we follow the easy path S-SE. through a forest and in 10 min. we reach the chapel of Agios Leontios. Wonderful location with souvals and ruins of a windmill and chimney. An all-round plateau with a diameter of 250 m. surrounded by rocky hills, a natural rain collector or burdehti, as it is called by the locals, was in the distant past the crater of the volcano of Aegina.

In front of us, in the distance of the horizon, the massif of Oros with the white-white Prophet Ilias. We follow the unclear, but well-marked path and in 10 minutes we reach a point with a beautiful view of Perdika, the island of Moni and the peninsula of Methana. The downhill path in 30 min. brings us to Panagitsa and the asphalt road on the right in 10 min., to Pachia Rachi.

Pachia Rachi – Kapotides –  Marathon

Time without stops: 45 min

(60% on dirt road, 40% on paved road with signage)

A village of farmers, breeders and famous buildings, in the old days, Pahiorachi is located at an altitude of 1,000 m above sea level. 225 m. and 8 km from the town on the road to the villages Lazarides and Anitsaio. We walk along the main road between wonderfully restored stone houses and reach the church of St. Dionysios built in 1864. Just opposite and 20 m away is the small church of Taxiarches where the flag of the Revolution was raised in the struggle of 1821. We leave the most beautiful village of the mountainous Aegina by going downhill on the dirt road and after 300m we follow the old stone-built road on the right, which runs between dry stone walls. Terraces with thick clover and olive trees accompany us on the shady route through the oak trees to Kapotides, another jewel of the unknown Aegina. Enchanted by the sweetness of the Aeginean sunset, we descend the dirt road (1,700 m) to the seaside Marathon.

Mount Ellanion (531 m) – Temple of Ellanios Zeus

Time without stops: 1 hour and 30 min.

(75% on a marked path, 25% on a dirt road)

At 8.5 km from the town to Anitsaio, we meet a dirt road on the right with a sign for the Temple of Ellanios Zeus. After 70 m from the junction, we follow the unclear path with red signs and a smooth slope to the left and in 8 min. we reach Sfirichtres (alt. 280 m), where a dirt road for 4×4 reaches. A corridor with huge stone steps 5 m wide leads us to the ruins of a large guesthouse with a 19.50 m frontage and 29 m deep, built on the walls of polygonal stone, built in the Hellenistic era. In this guesthouse, of which only the foundations of the columns survive today, the pilgrims of the sanctuary of the Ellanios Zeus, whose altar was built on the top of Oros, were accommodated. “Fragments of pottery show that the cult was established here during the Geometric period and lasted throughout antiquity,” writes the German archaeologist Gabriel Velter, who lived and studied Aegina for many years. With the conquest of Aegina, the Athenians installed clergymen on the island. One of them, Aristophanes, serves in the garrison here at Sfirichtres, which due to its location attracts a large number of birds, and writes “The Vultures”. In this same location, in the Byzantine years, the monastery of St. Nicholas was built, using building material from the ancient buildings. The cruciform church of Taxiarches that exists today is from the 17^th century. We follow the red marks to the east and in 25 m we find, carved into the rock, a souvala with beautiful rectangular stone watering troughs. A detour 100m higher leads us, stepping on unmarked stone piles, to a full-length corner in the rough rocky landscape. Built with isometric rectangular stones without smear and measuring 8.70 x 11.00 x 3.50 m. deep, this ancient cistern, the Drakosοuvala, is perhaps the most beautiful and best preserved souvala of Aegina.

We descend to the marked path and follow it in a S-SE direction on its ascending course to the highest peak of the island. Schina and astives and between them the ancient pilgrims’ path of the altar that the legend says was founded by the first inhabitant of the island, Aeacus, son of Zeus and king of the Myrmidons, who came with him from Thessaly and settled on the island. We pass by piles of stones, ruins of a fortified Mycenaean settlement and in 40 minutes from Taxiarchi we reach the top of Aegina. Traces of the base of the altar and the white-white small church of Ascension and Prophet Elias built on top of it. The view from here in all its glory. All around us Hydra, Poros, the Turtle of Methana, Ortholithi, snowy Ziria, Gerania, the white-washed Pateras, Parnitha, Penteli, Ymittos, Sounio, the Ochi of Evia and last but not least the island of Agios Georgios, a lonely stone ship, closing the huge circle of the Saronic Gulf.

With the sun falling on the hills of Troizinia, the sea is dyed with all shades of red to deep crimson. In 7-8 min. from the top we follow the wide path to the left and in 10 more minutes, when darkness falls, we are on the safety of the dirt road and in 15 min. on the asphalt road to the town.

Note: If you do not have your own transport, the taxi, from the time you notify it, takes 15 minutes to reach the intersection.

Anitsaio – Aposporides – Ag. Antonios – Vlachides

Time with return without stops: 2 hours

Best time: in the afternoon

(90% on 4×4 road, 10% on trail)

An invincible village, invincible since the old days, hence its name Anitsaio. Built at an altitude of 230 m. on the eastern slope of the mountain and 10 km. from the town, it is the largest and most lively village of the mountainous Aegina.

On Sunday afternoon we leave the car on the asphalt road and start our wanderings in the village that certainly moves at a different pace from the other mountain villages of the island. Farm trucks carry wood, animals and people. Children play hide-and-seek and ball and their voices mix with barking, darting, melodic bird calls and the atonal sounds of donkeys. Don’t go that way… the goat is giving birth., Mrs. Vasiliki warns us and we continue climbing up the small hill with the ruined windmill and the chapel of St. George facing the calm Saronic Gulf, with the capital city in the distant background. Pine trees, olive trees, olive and almond trees in blossom and among old stone houses, and others from the ’70s with terraces and waiting rooms waiting for the arrival of the new family member. Abandoned plows, amusement park horses, yards neatly arranged with dahlias of many leaves and chicken coops with colored chipboard and sheet metal, with elenite and concrete blocks. Forms, shapes, colours and aromas of lavender and arborica mixed with the smells of stables and other tickling scents of ribs coming from the chimney of Angeliki’s tavern. It used to be the village school, now “The Hunter’s Den”, the warm nest of the hungry, the romantic and those who seek beautiful flavors with a village aroma. We leave the aesthetic anarchy of the invincible even nowadays Anitsaio and follow by car or on foot the narrow concrete road on the right and in 300 m. we reach Aposporides. A group of wild horses that stand up at once in our passage is the only living presence in this small village. A detour on the path leaving to the right brings us in 10 min. to a plateau with 3 wells, many wild rabbits, partridges and beautiful views towards Anitsaio. We continue on the dirt road for 650 m. and just before reaching Vlachides we turn left at the iconostasis, going down the road suitable only for 4×4 to Ag. Antonis. After 15 minutes of walking we are in Grunta, another magical corner of the mountainous Aegina, with a wonderful view of the Kanakis.

The labyrinthine stone-built ruined neighbourhood of Grunta with its houses, outhouses, stables, barns and the small threshing floor, creates a sense of absolute balance with the huge reddish-yellow rocks and the small olive trees that pop up between them. 15 more minutes. and we arrive at the chapel of Ag. Antonis with the ruins of the Mycenaean wall, the souvala and the old military observatory at 308 m above the sea.

We return to the main dirt road and immediately afterwards we are in Vlachides. Cacti, grills, spider vines, olive trees and amphitheatrical green stairs decorated with colourful wildflowers that call for spring. A dozen or so houses, overlooking Poros and the silvery Saronic Gulf.

In the evening in Anitsaio, the pleasant conversation with Mr. Yannis Margaronis, a retired farm guard, continues from his hospitable house to the neighbouring tavern To Petrino Roloi (“The stone clock”) with rabbit stew, gheremezi and local wine.

Lazarides are 3 km from Pachia Rachi. It is a small settlement built on the smooth pine-wooded eastern slope of Mount Nikolaki and at an altitude of 3.5 m above sea level. 320 m. Behind the church of Agia Paraskevi, tombs of the Mycenaean period with important grave goods were discovered and transferred to the archaeological museum of Piraeus.

The ancient olive grove at the western foothills of Oros

Time with return without stops: 1 hour and 20 min.

(100% on dirt road only for 4×4)

In the afternoon, we start walking from the 5^th km of the road to Perdika, just opposite the 2^nd beach of Marathon.

We ascend the dirt road and in 15 min. we walk among magnificent formations of volcanic rocks with all the earthy colors and olive trees, many of which are more than 2,000 years old. The impressive shapes and forms of the trunks, with the centuries flowing in their wooden waters, their huge roots and branches glorifying to the sky, make the ancient olive grove one of the special places of the Aegina mountainous land.

An indispensable complement to this short walk are the three picturesque chapels: Agia Kyriaki with the remains of the ancient olive press and the wonderful view of Agistri, St. George and the oldest of all, Agia Triada with the huge stone cistern and the traces of cobblestone, reveal that this place was probably inhabited in much older times.

Sfentouri – Drakospito – Agioi Anargyroi – Sfentouri

Time without stops: 1 hour

(100% on a marked path)

Sfentouri is built on a smooth southern slope of the mountain and at an altitude of 1.5 m above sea level. 240 m. The name, they say, is from “sfenturizo” (v), meaning to fly away. It is, after all, the most remote village of Aegina to the south. Its first inhabitants were farmers and mainly shepherds. Today it is mainly inhabited by holidaymakers with around 20 Greeks and foreigners. Jean, translator and Jean-Jacques, director, actor and… builder of his wonderful house, welcome us. Warm tea and a chat with words of love for the island they chose years ago as their permanent home. To our question about the dragon houses or placote, as they are called here, Jean-Jacques jumps up and without us realizing it, crossing vertically across the terraces above the village, we find ourselves on the hilltop to admire the twin megalithic building. It is built in the euphoric manner, that is, with huge stones penetrating internally into each other in a shape reminiscent of an overturned tub. The roofs are covered by large flat slabs. With thoughts similar to those we had when we visited the almost identical dragon houses of Ochi in southern Evia, we follow the red marks E-SE. We pass through an ancient threshing floor and past a small dry souvala and descend towards the ruined settlement of Amygdalia and the small church of Agios Ioannis with its small cemetery and Makria Souvala (“Long Cistern”), the longest on the island (23 m long). The ascent to the neighbouring chapel of Ag. Anargyroi offers a spectacular view from Hydra to Ziria. Continue on the dirt road to Sfentouri. Just a few steps separate us from the end of the journey. There are only a few words left for the conclusion of the text dedicated to the mountainous, “stone-built Aegina”. The houses of the village look like a small group of spectators seated on the bleachers of a huge natural theatre formed by the magnificent terraces that stretch from the high ceilings of the dragon house down to the sea below, Klima. Spectators of the glowing protagonist smoldering behind the volcano of Methana, sending the last kiss of the day to the stones of the dry stone that makes them red… and the earth tremble because right now there is an earthquake.

Tuesday 29 January, shortly after 5 pm.