Food & wine
Sunday revithada
On Sunday, order the chickpeas that have baked all night in a clay pot in the wood oven, soft and sweet with onion and olive oil. Some tavernas make them every day in summer.
Tavernas across the island
Sifnos · Things to do
Things to do in Sifnos
Beaches, trails, festivals, food and wine: the experiences that make this island its own.
Experiences
Our favourite things to do
Ideas for every kind of day, from a lazy swim to a full-day hike.
Culture
Watch a potter at the wheel
Visit one of the island's workshops to see the clay pots for revithada and mastelo being thrown, and take one home.
Kamares, Vathi, Platis Gialos, Artemonas
Hike
Walk the Sifnos Trails
Pick one of the 19 signposted routes: Apollonia to Kastro in about an hour, Faros to Chrysopigi along the shore, or the long climb to Profitis Ilias. Spring and autumn are best.
All over the island
Beach
Swim below the Seven Martyrs
Walk down the steps from Kastro to the little chapel on its rock and dive into deep blue water from the rocks.
Kastro
Hike
Climb to Profitis Ilias
Follow the path up to the walled monastery on the top of the island. On a clear day you can count the Cyclades around you.
The highest peak, ≈ 680 m
Nature
Look for the dovecotes
The white Cycladic dovecotes, with their stone patterns of triangles and diamonds, stand in the fields below the villages. The paths take you right past them.
The valleys around Apollonia and Artemonas
Culture
The windmills of Artemonas
Walk up to the old windmills above the village at sunset for the view over the villages to Kastro and the sea.
Artemonas
Festival
Ascension Day at Chrysopigi
The island's greatest feast, for its patron, the Virgin of Chrysopigi. The icon is carried in procession and the island gathers at the monastery.
Chrysopigi, forty days after Easter
Festival
The Tselementes food festival
The Cycladic Gastronomy Festival 'Nikolaos Tselementes' brings cooks from across the Cyclades to set out tables of their islands' dishes, with music and dancing.
Sifnos, a weekend in early September
Only on Sifnos
What makes Sifnos different
What makes Sifnos different from every other Greek island.
The island of cooks
Nikolaos Tselementes, born in Exambela in 1878, wrote the cookbook of 1910 that taught Greece to cook, and gave moussaka its béchamel. On Sifnos, revithada, chickpeas baked overnight in a clay pot in a wood oven, is still the Sunday dish, and every September the island holds a festival of Cycladic food in his name.
Potters by the sea
Sifnos has rich veins of clay, and its potters were once so well known across the Aegean that 'a Sifnian' could simply mean a potter. They made the clay pots for revithada and mastelo, and the chimney pots on the roofs. Workshops still work at Kamares, Vathi, Platis Gialos, Artemonas and Cherronisos.
Some 200 km of paths
Old stone and marble paths, some of them thousands of years old, link every village, monastery and bay. About 200 km of them are cleared and signposted as the Sifnos Trails, with 19 marked routes past dovecotes, wells, windmills and chapels.
A chapel on every hill
Islanders like to say there is a church for every day of the year; the count is more than 230. Each has its feast day, the panigyri, often with a shared meal after the service. The greatest is at Chrysopigi on Ascension Day.