Pyrgi, Chios: The Painted Village of the Xysta

A balcony framed by carved black-and-white xysta patterns in Pyrgi, Chios

Pyrgi is the most photographed village on Chios, and no other village in Greece looks like it. Every house front in its medieval core is covered from ground to eaves in the black-and-white geometric patterns called xysta, scratched into the plaster in triangles, diamonds, zigzags and rosettes, so that the whole village reads as a … Read more