Gerolimenas cove
— a stone cove the road almost forgot.
Not only on a wall.
Gerolimenas cove, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A small horseshoe cove on the southwest tip of the Mani, ringed by tall houses of pale grey stone, with Cape Tainaron a short drive further south. Gerolimenas was built in the late 1860s as a trading harbour for quail, oil, and acorns, and the warehouses on the quay still carry the dates above their doors. The water turns deep blue against the rock, and most evenings the only sound is the line of boats knocking softly against the seawall.
The place, in three passes.
Gerolimenas is a small fishing village on the southwest coast of the Mani peninsula, the middle of the three southern peninsulas of the Peloponnese, in the regional unit of Laconia. The settlement wraps a sheltered horseshoe cove backed by limestone cliffs. The permanent population is under one hundred. The village was founded in 1870 by a Mavromichalis family member as a trading harbour for cured quail, olive oil, and acorns shipped to Smyrna and beyond. Cape Tainaron, the southernmost point of mainland Greece, lies about twenty kilometres further south by road.
The Mani is built almost entirely of pale grey local limestone, and Gerolimenas's warehouses and merchant houses, raised in the 1870s and 1880s along the quay, carry dates and family marks above their doors. The towers of nearby Vatheia, Kitta, and Lagia, some four storeys high, were raised for clan defence in the long feuds the region was known for through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Mani's stone landscape, treeless and bone-coloured, gave the British traveller Patrick Leigh Fermor the subject of his 1958 book Mani.
Gerolimenas is at the end of the road; the route from Areopoli, the regional capital, runs about forty kilometres south through Kitta and Vatheia and dead-ends at the cove. There is no through traffic. A handful of small hotels and tavernas line the quay; most close out of season. Evenings the village empties of the day's visitors and the only sound is the line of small boats knocking softly against the seawall and the wind off the open Mediterranean.
