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A hiking trail linking 46 ancient Greek villages

For centuries,quina 04/12/2019 dozens of stone-built communities have been linked by a series of cobblestone paths and rock-hewn bridges. Now, travellers can embark on these time-worn trails.

On a sunny May morning, I met Michális Georgaras, a Greek trekking guide, in Athens. Armed with backpacks and hiking gear, we embarked on a six-hour drive to reach the northernmost region of Western Greece, Zagorohoria, for a week-long exploration. As we left Athens behind, the landscape shifted from rows of rolling olive trees to thick pine forest and steep ridges.

"Most people don't think of Greece as a mountainous place," Georgaras said. "But 80% of our land is made of mountains."

To many travellers, Greece is synonymous with the ancient history of its cities and the whitewashed houses of its islands. Yet, the nation's deep ravines and seldom-explored mountainous landscape is where much of its traditional culture still endures, and Zagorohoria (sometimes called Zagori) is one of its most surprising – and stunning – corners.

Nestled in the Pindus mountains near the border with Albania, Zagorohoria is comprised of 46 remote stone-built communities separated from the nearest region by the Mitsikeli mountain range. In fact, the name Zagorohoria itself means "the villages behind the mountain", and because of its far-flung location, the region has remained isolated until relatively recently.

Paved roads only arrived here in the 1970s, but in the centuries prior, residents travelled between villages via a series of arching stone-built bridges, cobblestone paths and stone-hewed staircases that still connect these 46 communities today. The unique stone network linking these ancient rock towns led Unesco to inscribe Zagorohoria as a World Heritage Site in 2023.

Nowadays, it's possible to explore this remote region by car, but the best way to experience it is by hiking along the ancient kalderimia footpath network, built in the 15th Century to serve nomadic shepherds, tradesmen, pilgrims and farmers and still used by residents today.

"You can find these kinds of footpaths in many parts of Greece, but Zagori definitely has one of the largest kalderimia in the country," said Stephanie Contomichalos, who designed a five-day hiking excursion with Georgaras that allows visitors to explore the region's ancient stone paths and stay in traditional stone homes-turned family-run guesthouses.

Six hours after setting out from Athens, we finally made it to the mountains and one of Zagori's largest villages: Vitsa, population 84. The view from the outdoor terrace of our inn, the Selini Guesthouse, opened to a seemingly endless expanse of oaks, beeches and pine trees stretching out into the horizon.

The next morning, low-lying clouds rolled in, covering most of the surrounding hills in an ethereal mist. "This region gets more rain than London," Georgaras noted.

Following a kaldermi, we walked to Vitsa's main square, known as the "balcony" of Zagorohoria due to its spectacular view over a 12km-long canyon separating towering limestone cliffs just below. Standing in the centre of the square, almost like the statue of a ruler, was a 600-year-old plane tree protected by a dry-stone wall.

"Zagorohoria's architecture is deeply embedded into nature," explained George Karvelas, an architect who led two restoration projects in the nearby villages of Mikro Papingo and Tsepelovo.

As Karvelas explained, most villages in Zagori are organised similarly: stone homes typically radiate from a central square built around a plane tree, which signals the presence of groundwater. The village's main church is typically located around the square, and some communities are surrounded by forests that were once considered sacred. Cutting down their trees for anything other than communal projects like building schools was punished by the Greek Orthodox Church with excommunication.

Later that day, we followed Contomichalos and Georgaras along a 7.4km path from Vitsa to the village of Kipoi to visit some of the region's most famous stone landmarks: the bridges of Missiou, Kokkori and Mylos, each built in the 1700s.

Much like its stone villages, Zagori's footpaths look like they emerged organically from the mountain. "They were built based on in-depth knowledge of local climate," Georgaras said. On each side of the cobblestone path, small canals ran parallel to the slope. "These were designed to disperse rainfall and avoid landslides,"?Georgaras explained. "While if you look at this column," he said, pointing to the limestone pillars built in 1750 to support the arching Kokkori bridge, "you'll see that they are V-shaped to withstand the predominant currents of the river."

According to Polyxeni Mantzou, a professor of architecture at the University of Ioannina, the fact that these paths, bridges and homes were designed to embrace nature rather than control it has allowed them to survive for centuries with relatively little maintenance. "They built according to the climate, the morphology and using local materials," said Mantzou. "They had an excellent understanding of place."

As we walked to Kipoi, I noticed other details that reveal the region's unique history. "This signpost here is carved with the name of donors who financed this part of the footpath," Georgaras said, pointing to a limestone cliff inscribed with a cross, date and list of names. "Most public buildings like bridges, schools and churches were financed by wealthy tradesmen during the 17th, 18th and 19th Century," he explained.

Despite its geographical isolation, Zagori's history is shaped by its special connection with the outside world. Like much of Greece, Zagorohoria was under Ottoman rule from the mid-15th Century to 1821. As Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou, an archaeologist who wrote a book on the region's history, explained, beginning in the 1400s, Zagori's leaders negotiated a degree of autonomy with Ottoman rulers in exchange for military assistance.

During the following 300 years, local elites established profitable trading networks in Southern and Eastern Europe, via the vast network of footpaths that connected this part of Epirus with the Balkans. This cobblestone highway allowed them to finance schools, bridges and wells. Travelling abroad was so common for men that most agricultural work was left to women, Moudopoulos-Athanasiou explained.

Today, walking along the kalderimia (rather than driving around them) allows visitors to better grasp the unique culture and history of these villages. "All activities, from farming to trade, began by walking on these footpaths," Moudopoulos-Athanasiou said. "Merchants reached distant parts of the empire on the kalderimia?and women walked on these trails each day to go out to the fields."

Hiking also allows travellers to experience the many engineering marvels that led these villages to become inscribed by Unesco. On our 8km hikefrom the village of Kapesovo to Vradeto, we scaled the Vradeto staircase, a 1.5km stone path winding 1,100 steps up the slope of Mount Tymfi where it was hard to distinguish the dry-stone construction from the natural limestone formations.

From Vradeto, we continued along a dirt trail cutting through orchid-dotted meadows to reach the Beloi viewpoint, and a breathtaking view of the region's geological star: the Vikos Gorge. Sometimes called "the Greek Grand Canyon", the 20km-long chasm is much greener than its US counterpart and its deep V-framed jagged cliffs are no less dramatic.

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On our third day, a 12km hike from Monodendri to Vikos (part of Vikos–Ao?s National Park), took us deep into the depths of the gorge. Descending the path felt like entering an otherworldly realm. The only audible sounds were the birdsongs and the constant buzzing of bees and butterflies. Tufts of wild orchids, Jerusalem sage and wild tulips sprang up between the path's weathered stones and highlighted the region's rich biodiversity – nearly one-third of Greece's total plant species are found in Zagori.

After traversing moss-covered forests and a dried-out riverbed, we eventually reached the springs of the Voidomatis river, where pools of emerald water were crowned by centuries-old plane trees. We reemerged in Vikos, a village famous for the medicinal properties of its herbs that grow naturally on its slopes.

While this five-day excursion allows travellers to explore Zagori's natural and man-made wonders, it also reveals its shifting identity. As in much of rural Greece, many families here began migrating to cities in search of jobs starting in the 1900s, leaving parts of Zagori depopulated and its homes shuttered. But some – like the Selini Guesthouse, run by Maria Karaiannis and her husband Dimitri, a Vitsa native – have been reborn as inns.

According to Mantzou, travellers started trickling into the region roughly 20 years ago and have helped revive it. But in recent years, another group of visitors have started arriving that Matzou believes is just as important to preserving these unique communities: international experts who are coming to study Zagori's unique biodiversity, sustainable architecture and climate adaptation.

Last May, Mantzou and other colleagues from the University of Ioannina and the Artemis European University hosted workshops on sustainable architecture as part of an EU-funded programme. When climate experts assessed the region's centuries-old stone homes, they found that they were so well designed for energy efficiency and climate adaptability, that it's almost as if they followed current models used to build green homes.

"[The people who built these homes centuries ago] lacked the tools to make these calculations," Mantzou says. "All they had was a very in-depth understanding of local [environment]."

As we seek to adapt to a changing climate, these "villages behind the mountains" could teach us an important lesson in nature-based design.

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