Above: Me in the village of Finikas, Syros on Friday 02/08/2013. Click the image to see a bigger version.
The village of Galissas is really a small farming community – very quiet and very peaceful (even at the peak season in August) – like all towns and villages on Syros, really. But if you want something else to do – for a change of scene you can walk for 30 minutes to the next village: Finikas (Φοίνικας).
One day fairly early on in our holiday – about Friday 2. August – Mum, Corrie and I left Dad at the pool and walked along the main road to Finikas. Finikas is another small village on the Western coast of Syros, bigger than Galissas though with a few more small tourist shops, a butcher, a baker, and – not a candlestick maker – but a greengrocer instead.
This made Finikas a useful place to visit on the odd occastions when we chose to eat in – as we were doing on this particular night. On two nights we went to the butcher in Finikas, and I asked for μισό κιλό κίμα μοσζχάρι για μπολονέζ (half a kilo of minced beef for bolognese). The supermarket in Finikas also had a wider variety of products than the ones in Galissas, including a proper cheese/ham counter. We got fruit & veg from the greengrocer and got rolls for lunch from the baker.
In Finikas itself there is a small, narrow beach, but still nice and sandy and even in the peak season we found somewhere to sit (although you’ll find people are rather packed together when it gets busy). For more space, walk to Kokkino beach, only a short distance away – or head in the other direction for Voulgari (Βούλγαρι), Poseidonia (Ποσειδωνία), Agkathopes (Αγκαθωπές) and Komito (Κόμητο) beaches.
Heading back from Finikas, opposite the greengrocer, there is a narrow farm track which will take you most of the way back to Galissas – this is a more exciting route than the main road: you can see the real Syros! From the back routes, you see up close all the farm land, the farm houses built along the route and the smaller off-the-tourist-map villages.
Syros is very much a working island – with the majority of the tourists to the island being Greeks, the busy period for the island lasts only about a month: mid-July to mid-August (with August 15. being the big celebration at this time of year. It is a public holiday in Greece and many other countries).
To conclude today’s blog post, Finikas is a nice place to walk to with more shops then Galissas. However… if you want to get to the nearest ATM, need a wider selection of shops, or need a kiosk from which to buy a top up card for your Greek sim card, you’ll need to head for Ermoupoli: Capital of Syros, of the Cyclades, and of the South Aegean.
And it is Ermoupoli which I will write about tomorrow.
Good night,
FH.