Just below the crest of a mountain on Tinos, in Greece ’s Cycladic archipelago, sturdy oak trees are bent low to the ground, the near-constant northern wind sculpting their trunks and branches into bizarre, gravity-defying poses. Known as the Meltemi, these winds have occupied an outsize place in the Tinian psyche since antiquity, when a myth arose to explain them: Hercules, angry at Boreas for killing his friend, took revenge on the god of the north wind by killing Boreas’s children on Tinos. The grieving and enraged father, in turn, unleashed his fierce gales to blow on the rocky landscape for all eternity.
Today, the Meltemi make the scorching summer sun bearable and keep the grapes in the vineyards from overheating. They whip up surfable waves at Kolymbithra beach, in an Aegean Sea that is otherwise as placid as a swimming pool, and help deter cruise ships and superyachts from encroaching on this low-key haven where wild goats roam the unspoiled terrain and stray cats patrol the convivial public squares. The island is increasingly a favorite spot for vacation homes among a creative set of Greeks and other Europeans— Poor Things filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek National Opera artistic director Giorgos Koumendakis, along with fellow artists, architects, musicians, and the like—looking to avoid the hubbub of the country’s more popular retreats and drawn to Tinos’s longstanding ties to the art world.
For decades, though, most tourists here have been religious pil.