Portaria mountain town
— the plane-tree square that holds the cold spring.
Not only on a wall.
Portaria mountain town, 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.
“Portaria sits at about six hundred and fifty metres on the western face of Mount Pelion, an hour's switchbacks above the port of Volos. The houses are stone, with grey schist roofs that hold the rain. Plane trees shade the central square, and the spring beneath them runs cold even in August. Tsipouro tavernas open onto the slope. In winter the snow line drops below the village and the bells of the church carry down the gorge toward the gulf.
The place, in three passes.
Portaria is a traditional mountain village on the western slopes of Mount Pelion in Thessaly, central Greece. It sits at roughly six hundred and fifty metres elevation, about thirteen kilometres above the port city of Volos by a switchback road. The village is part of the municipality of Volos and one of the historic Pelion settlements, with stone houses, grey schist roofs, and cobbled lanes that pre-date the road. The Adamas torrent runs down the gorge below the village to the Pagasetic Gulf. The Holy Monastery of Portaria, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, gave the village its name.
Pelion architecture is its own dialect. The houses are built of local schist and stone, two or three storeys, with overhanging upper floors and the grey slate roofs that Pelion is known for. Many of the mansions in Portaria are nineteenth-century, raised on the silk and tanning wealth of the era before the road to Volos was cut. The central square, Plateia Adamenas, is paved in stone and shaded by old plane trees. A cold spring runs continuously beneath them, channelled into a stone basin that has been in use for generations.
Portaria runs on two seasons. In summer the village is a cool escape from the heat of Volos and the gulf below, with daytime temperatures often ten degrees Celsius lower than the coast. In winter, snow falls regularly and the Agriolefkes ski centre on Pelion's upper slopes, around twenty-seven kilometres above the village, draws weekend traffic from Athens and Thessaloniki. The shoulder months bring chestnuts, mushrooms, and the long evenings of tsipouro on the square. The Holy Week processions through the cobbled lanes are a fixed point in the village year.
