Cover: a lion of St Mark, carved on Tinos in 2026 by Lorentzos Vidalis, photographed in his workshop at Kionia. Photograph by the author, by permission of the sculptor.
Tine la Fedele
What is known about one Greek island – and what is only thought to be known.
Venice called it la Fedele, the faithful one, and held it for five hundred and eight years, its last possession in the Aegean, lost in 1715 without a shot fired. Long before Venice, the Greeks called it Hydroussa: the watery one.
Four parts follow: the land, the rule, the faith, the people. A thousand chapels. Dovecotes built like lace. A boulder field grazed by sheep. A marble trade that outlived the empire that brought it by three hundred years. And a village of forty-five people whose name has been in the registers since 1597.