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Lost in Megalochori

Between white walls and blue shadows

By Trotternama

July 24^th, 2025

The bus drops me at the edge of Megalochori with the casual indifference of a machine that had performed this task ten thousand times before. No fanfare, no sign announcing arrival—just the pneumatic hiss of doors opening onto dust-white caldera stone and the driver's grunt that this was as far as he went. The other passengers, mostly construction workers returning from the hotels of Oia, disperse into the maze of lanes without looking back.

I have come searching for the Santorini that existed before Instagram, before the cruise ships began disgorging their daily cargo of sunset-seekers. The main square—if you could call the widening of lanes where three paths converged a square—contains the usual suspects: a church with its blue dome faded to the color of a forgotten swimming pool, a kafeneio where old men moved dominos with the deliberation of chess masters, and inexplicably, a wine bar advertising "Assyrtiko tastings daily at 4.

The tour groups are passing me like schools of fish, their guides holding colored paddles aloft—yellow for Germans, red for Chinese, blue for Americans. They move with purpose through Megalochori's central square, cameras raised, hunting the perfect Instagram frame of blue-domed churches against white-washed walls. I let them flow around me and disappear into the first unnamed alley I can find.

The lane is barely wide enough for my shoulders. White walls rise on either side, not built but carved from the volcanic pumice, their surfaces rounded and organic like the inside of a seashell. Above, the walls nearly touch, creating a tunnel of shade that offers respite from the Cycladic sun. My footsteps echo in the narrow space—the only sound besides the distant hum of tourist chatter, already fading.

Architecture of disappearance

Megalochori's true genius reveals itself in these back passages: an architecture designed not for display but for disappearance. The houses aren't individual structures but a continuous organism of carved rock, one dwelling flowing into the next without clear boundaries. Doors appear where you least expect them—some at street level, others accessed by stairs that seem to lead nowhere until you turn the corner and find another hidden entrance.

I pass a blue door, its paint peeling in a way that suggests decades of sun and salt air. Through a crack at its base, light escapes along with the sound of a television playing Greek news. A woman's voice rises and falls in conversation—probably on the phone, probably about something mundane, probably unaware that fifty tourists have photographed her door this morning.

The path splits. I choose left, then right, then left again, each decision leading deeper into the maze. The tourist sounds vanish entirely. Here, the village breathes differently. Laundry hangs between buildings like prayer flags—practical whites and blues, a child's school uniform, the black dress of perpetual mourning that some Greek widows never abandon.

A cat watches me from a windowsill, its eyes suggesting I am trespassing.

In a courtyard no bigger than a hotel bathroom, I discover Megalochori's parallel life. An old woman sits in a plastic chair, beans spread on a cloth before her, sorting good from bad with movements so automatic her hands seem to work independently of thought. She doesn't look up as I pass. I have entered the realm of the invisible—the locals who move through their village like ghosts, unseen by visitors who come seeking exactly this kind of "authentic" scene.

Further on, through an archway draped with bougainvillea, a man is repairing fishing nets in his underground garage, the space carved so deep into the rock it feels submarine. The walls sweat moisture. His radio plays bouzouki music, the sound tinny and distant. When he finally notices me, he neither smiles nor frowns—just nods and returns to his nets. I am irrelevant to his afternoon, which is exactly as it should be.

The architecture enforces this invisibility. The real life of the village happens behind walls, in courtyards glimpsed through barely-open doors, in cave rooms that face inward rather than out toward the views that sell for thousands per night. The houses present blank faces to the narrow streets—white walls punctuated only by small windows, blue doors, and the occasional burst of bougainvillea.

Privacy as architectural principle.

Lost in a maze

I no longer know where I am. Each turn reveals another passage identical to the last—white walls, blue shadows, stone steps worn smooth by centuries of feet. The village has swallowed me.

A wooden door stands ajar, revealing stairs that descend into darkness. I follow them down, the temperature dropping with each step, until I emerge in what must be an old wine cave converted to storage. Garden tools hang from hooks hammered into volcanic rock. Demijohns of wine line one wall. A bicycle, impossibly, leans in the corner—how anyone has carried it down those stairs defies understanding.

Back up, out, around another corner. The passages branch and merge like blood vessels, following no logic but their own. Sometimes I walk through tunnels where the walls join overhead, creating brief moments of cave-darkness. Other times the path opens onto tiny squares—just widenings in the lane where two or three doors gather like gossiping neighbors.

What strikes me most is how the village reveals its age through layers rather than monuments. Here, a Venetian arch incorporated into what is clearly a much older structure. There, modern concrete patches on ancient pumice walls, the repairs already weathering to match their surroundings. Electrical wires run along medieval stone like black veins, carrying modern life through arteries carved when electricity was still centuries away.

In the next lane, an old man emerges from an invisible door carrying a tray of tomatoes, their red violence shocking against the monochrome village. He sets them on a windowsill to ripen in a shaft of sunlight that has found its way between buildings. By evening, they will be gone—taken inside for dinner, invisible to the tourists who will photograph that same windowsill, empty and picturesque.

The village's famous blue and white colour scheme, I realise, is both authentic and artificial. The white makes sense—volcanic pumice bleached by sun, lime-wash renewed annually since Byzantine times. But the blue? That is newer, a twentieth-century addition when someone decided Greek islands should match the flag. Now it is mandatory tradition, enforced by tourism boards and Instagram expectations.

Yet in the back alleys, other colors persist. A green door, paint so faded it might have been blue once. A pink wall where bougainvillea has stained the stone. The yellow of old wood, exposed where white-wash has peeled away. The village's true colors, visible only to those who wander lost enough to see them.

I pass a house where renovation is underway. Workers have stripped one wall back to its original stone, revealing the geological history of the island—layers of ash and pumice from different eruptions, compressed into building material. By tomorrow, it will be white again, its history hidden under fresh lime.

As afternoon deepens, the village's hidden life grows louder. Behind walls, families are preparing for evening meals—the clatter of pots, oil sizzling, children called to wash hands. Television voices escape through small windows, a dozen different programs creating a babbel of noise that rises and falls like waves.

In one courtyard, visible through an iron gate, a woman waters geraniums with focused intensity. Her garden is invisible from any tourist route, existing purely for her own pleasure. The smell of wet earth and flowers drifts into the alley, mixing with the ever-present scent of jasmine and the faint sulphur that reminds you this island is, at heart, a volcano.

Eventually, inevitably, the maze releases me. I emerge on the village's western edge, where the last cave houses give way to vineyards. The transition is abrupt—one moment enclosed by white walls, the next standing on open ground with the caldera spread before me like a geological textbook.

A bench here, positioned for sunset views. Tourists are gathering, their cameras ready. They will see the sunset, spectacular no doubt, but many of them willl leave without seeing Megalochori.

The real village remains invisible behind us—in those twisted lanes where old women sort beans and old men fix nets, where laundry dries on lines strung between medieval walls, where life continues its daily rounds behind blue doors that open only for residents. The architecture itself conspires to hide this parallel world, creating a labyrinth that confuses and expels casual visitors while sheltering those who belong.

Walking back through the village as shadows lengthen, I take a different route—or think I do. In the maze, all paths eventually lead to the same places, just by different ways. I find myself again at a familiar corner, or one that looks familiar, where someone has placed a small glass shrine into a wall niche.

This time I notice what I missed before: a photograph tucked behind the icon, showing the village from above. The same white buildings, the same blue church domes, but something essentially different. No tourist facilities, no signs in English, no boutique hotels. Just a working village, its residents as invisible to the outside world as they are now invisible to the tourists who come seeking that frame of social influence.

An old woman in black—perhaps the same one from the church, perhaps another, they all look similar in their uniform of mourning—pauses at the shrine. She crosses herself, lights the oil lamp with practiced efficiency, and continues on her way, her black dress almost invisible against the shadows.

As I finally find my way back to the main square—or am delivered there by the village's own logic—I understand something about Megalochori's architecture. It isn't just built for beauty or practicality. It is built for privacy, for community that faces inward rather than out, for life that can continue unseen even as thousands of strangers wander through daily.

The tour groups are returning to their buses, their guides counting heads, their cameras full of the same photographs—blue domes, white walls, bougainvillea, sunset. They have seen exactly what they came to see, which is exactly what the village allows them to see. The real Megalochori—the one where people live rather than perform, where walls hide rather than display—remains as invisible as its residents.

I think of those endless white passages, how easy it is to get lost, how that lostness feels like a gift the village offers to those willing to accept it. In the maze, you stop being a tourist and become simply another figure in the shadows, moving through spaces shaped by centuries of daily life, invisible and therefore free to see.

The last bus to Fira waits at the square's edge. As I board, I look back at the village, its white walls glowing in the last light. Somewhere in that labyrinth, dinner preparations continue. Somewhere, an old man still mends nets. Somewhere, a woman waters geraniums in a courtyard no tourist will ever photograph. The village keeps its secrets, wrapped in white walls and blue shadows, hiding in plain sight.

Through the bus window, I watch Megalochori shrink and disappear, becoming just another white cluster on the caldera's edge. But I know now what those white walls conceal—not just buildings but a way of building that makes invisibility possible, that allows life to continue in the margins of tourism's gaze, in the spaces between Instagram frames. The perfect architecture for the perfect disappearance.

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