Papingo stone village
— grey stone, slate roofs, mountain at the door.
Not only on a wall.
Papingo stone village, 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.
“Two villages above the deepest gorge in Greece — Megalo Papingo and Mikro Papingo, a kilometre apart, both built entirely of the local grey limestone the Pindus mountains hand them. Slate roofs. Walled lanes. The Towers of Astraka rise straight from the back of the village, pale in the morning and the colour of bread by evening. Few cars.
The place, in three passes.
Papingo sits in the Zagori region of Epirus in northwest Greece, on the western flank of the Tymfi massif, above the Vikos Gorge — the deepest in the country relative to its width and protected within Vikos-Aoos National Park. Megalo Papingo holds roughly two hundred residents; Mikro Papingo a few dozen. Both are reached from the city of Ioannina by a single mountain road that climbs through Aristi and crosses a stone-arch bridge over the Voidomatis river. Zagori itself was inscribed as a UNESCO cultural landscape in 2023, recognising forty-six stone villages and their network of arched bridges.
Every house, every wall, every roof in Papingo is built from the local grey limestone — the same stone that forms the cliffs of the Astraka towers above. Roofs are laid in slate slabs an inch thick, weighted at the eaves. The villages were declared protected traditional settlements in 1976, which is why no concrete or aluminium has been allowed since. Restoration must use stone of matching colour and roughly matching coursing. The effect at distance is a village that disappears into its own mountain, until the late sun catches a slate roof and the cluster reads back out of the cliff.
Elevation runs around 950 metres in Megalo Papingo and a touch higher in Mikro. The trailhead for the Astraka refuge — the most-walked hut in the Pindus, at 1,950 metres, run by the Greek Mountaineering Club of Ioannina — starts at the upper edge of Mikro Papingo. Winters are cold and often heavy with snow; the lower Voidomatis valley stays warmer. June through October is the walking season, with the autumn colour through October especially worth the road. November and February the villages quiet to almost nothing.
