Page 34 - Travel Leisure - USA (February 2020)

E X P E R I E N C E S
GETTING THERE
Olympic Air (olympic
air.com) runs regular
nonstop flights from
Athens to Páros
National Airport, in
Aliki. Ferries to Páros
are available from
Athens, Mykonos,
and Santorini.
TRAVEL PLANNER
“Páros offers the
feel of Mykonos twenty
years ago,” says
Mina Agnos (mina@
travelive.com; 561-
300-7436), a member
of T+L’s A-List of the
world’s best travel
advisors. Agnos and
her team at Travelive
can incorporate Páros
into a more extensive
itinerary of the Greek
islands. She can plan a
shopping excursion in
the town of Naoussa,
as well as organize a
private boat trip to
neighboring islands.
30 T R AV E L + L E I S U R E
By the time Kalia and I walk back to our table,
the procession of dishes has begun: sea urchin,
octopus, mackerel, crab, shrimp, tuna, and, of
course, swordfish—presented with dips, greens,
mousses, pastries, and herbed oils. Salmatanis is a
fourth-generation cook, and the only Ritz
Escoffier–trained chef in Greece. Kouda tells us
the restaurant is especially popular among French
vacationers. (The film composer Alexandre
Desplat, who scored The Shape of Water, is a
regular.) It’s an easy table to book, though,
because it’s a hard place to find, and because
Salmatanis and Kouda spend practically all of
their time and energy on the food, and on visiting
with guests, and almost none on self-promotion.
“We want everybody to be full,” Kouda says,
bringing a bowl of mussels steamed in Chardonnay
and another white variety, Malagousia. “Can you
taste the salt in the mussels? That is the taste of the
water here,” she says, and I recognize it.
When Kalia first visited Páros, as a teenager, she
fell in love with the island’s elemental pleasures—
“a perfect tomato, the blue of the water.” The
island’s history enchants her, too. Powers from
Mycenae to Venice left ruins here. The marvelous
archaeological museum in Parikía, the island’s
capital, holds the oldest surviving Cycladic marble
statuette, made 50 centuries before the birth of
Christ: a Neolithic figure of a woman, not much
more than two inches tall. And there are churches.
For a permanent population of fewer than 16,000
people, Páros has 450 of them—including one,
| F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 0
Granite boulders in
the pool at Parilio
evoke nearby
Kolympithres
Beach.
Panagia Ekatontapiliani (the Church of
the Hundred Gates), that dates back to
the fourth century.
The yin and yang of sensation and
tradition that drew Kalia to Páros is
evoked by its geography. The island’s
shape is approximately round. Hills
ripple into plains and shores. The core
of Páros is flawless white marble that
has been prized since antiquity. Many
of Greek civilization’s greatest treasures
were fashioned from it: the Winged
Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de’
Medici, the façade of the Temple of
Apollo at Delphi. Quarrying the marble
is now illegal, but if you are steady on
your feet, you can still hike down into
the shafts where it was mined.
Better to see the marble glow in
sunlight, though. Beaches, not
quarries, are the island’s main assets
today, and many stretches of the
shoreline are scattered with marble
pebbles. Páros occupies about
75 square miles, so you need a car to
sample its full buffet of beaches. There
are dozens, to suit any taste or mood.
If you can find no beach to love on
Páros, you are past helping.
The one I like best is Kalogeros, a
secluded cove where Kalia and I scoop
out thick veins of gray clay to slather on