Costis Versus The Volcano

GREECE’S ECONOMY MAY BE IN TURMOIL, BUT TOURISM IS BOOMING. PERHAPS THAT’S BECAUSE OF UTOPIAS LIKE SANTORINI’S PERIVOLAS, WHICH EXISTS PROUDLY OUT OF TIME.

- Zander Abranowicz

I was five months old when my parents carried me from a small Olympic Airlines plane onto the tarmac at Santorini, exposing my skin to the Mediterranean sun for the first time. There to meet us was Costis Psychas, my godfather and the owner of Perivolas, the iconic hotel perched on the precipitous edge of the impossibly picturesque village of Oia.

In the early 1980s, Psychas’s mother and father restored a cluster of 300-year old fisherman’s and shepherd’s cave dwellings, turning them into pristine white guest rooms that feel as if they’ve been scooped out of solid rock by the hand of a benevolent Greek god to provide sanctuary to voyagers lost at sea.