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.