Author: Valerio Castellini

On a Cycladic island reimagined for profit, a realtor tries to preserve what made it livable.

By Valerio Castellini

People don’t have the same patience that they used to have. Then everything has to happen fast, and we change ourselves as people.

Sophia Katsipi sits behind a glass desk in her real estate agency in Parikia, the capital of Paros. The sun-bleached white walls of the office make it bright, faithful to the muted geometries of Cycladic architecture. “I renovated this myself,” she says. “This is my kind of input. I’d like to see more buildings like this.” A simple rectangular plan, minimalistic interior, and small, wooden windows. A style that has evolved over the centuries, as a result of the climatic demands of the islands. Sipping on an espresso while her white poodle circles the chairs, she mused about the island’s future.

“People from France, Switzerland, Belgium, northern Italy—they came here for the culture. They maintained the look of the island, they appreciated the traditional buildings,” she explains. “They passed on that same kind of culture to the next generation.” These visitors often stayed for months, eventually buying homes. Some relocated permanently. Most came in May or September, well before the streets of the island towns began to buckle under peak-season traffic.

But that was before Paros became an investment product. “The majority of investors, at the moment, look at the yielding,” said Katsipi. “They are not here to actually live on the island. They’re here to develop, sell, go—or redevelop, go again. They don’t really care about the effect on the island.”

Today, a wave of short-term investors, often with no plans to live on the island, are reshaping the market. Their priority is yield: building large, eye-catching villas—preferably with pools—to flip for profit or monetise through high-end rentals. 

“Paros is like a mini market,” she says. “We don’t have a brand name. I’m not sure what type of tourism we want.”

This shift has profound implications—not only for what is being built, but for whom Greece is attracting. “I don’t think culture has any connection with money,” she adds.

At the center of this transformation is a paradox. The more Greece tries to grow its tourism economy, the more it risks losing the very attributes that once made it attractive: affordability, authenticity, and embeddedness. What’s vanishing is not only traditional architecture or artisanal pottery, but a form of tourism that was socially and economically symbiotic. What Katsipi calls “cultured tourism” is being priced out—by policy decisions as much as by property sales.

“People don’t have the same patience that they used to have. Then everything has to happen fast, and we change ourselves as people,” Sophia explains, building on years of observing clients go through her office. “The majority today comes as investors, they look at the yielding.”

The reasons for this shift are multiple. With national and regional authorities slow to regulate construction and incapable of consistent enforcement, island professionals have found themselves standing in for absent institutions.

In 2024, Greece received over 35.9 million international visitors—more than three times the country’s population. Total tourism spending reached €21.6 billion, making the sector one of the country’s most vital economic engines. But on the Cycladic frontlines, those tasked with translating demand into homes, stays, and space are increasingly unsure of what kind of tourism they are building toward.

“We try to educate,” Katsipi says. “You might have a person that comes and says, ‘I want to build a villa with five-meter windows,’” she explains. Architectural guidelines in Paros and surrounding islands restrict window widths to prevent oversized, floor‑to‑ceiling glazing that can disrupt the Cubic white forms of Cycladic architecture. However, often these rules are bent—small illegal acts that accumulate across the landscape, slowly eroding its visual rhythm. “Even if you manage illegally to do something like this […] when you look at the island afterwards, it will look like a suburb of Athens,” concludes Katsipi.

In the current building spree, local realtors are left to navigate the gaps. “If the architect says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it,’ who am I?” Katsipi asks. “This job is difficult. You are always in between too many people— lawyers, notaries, engineers. […]  There’s only so much we can do.”

Still, many try. Katsipi helped co-found the island’s Realtors Association to promote ethical practices and defend against what she calls the “illogical logic” of state policy. In an industry where “my word is my signature” used to suffice, she now insists on contracts, disclosure, and transparency. “A business that’s not only for today, but for long-lasting, is based on ethics,” emphasises Katsipi.

Nowhere is the state’s contradiction more visible than in its approach to swimming pools. In Paros, private pools are banned outside town settlements—nominally to preserve water. Yet they remain legal within towns, where density is higher and infrastructure often weaker.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Katsipi says. “Outside town, in 8,000 square meters of land, you can build 280 square meters and have maybe three pools, max. But inside town, you can divide into 1,000-meter plots, build much more, and have four pools. It doesn’t make sense that it’s for water preservation.”

More broadly, this kind of prohibition, she argues, doesn’t reduce water use—it just fuels informal workarounds. Shallow “splash pools” are dug, then quietly deepened once the final checks have been conducted at the end of the construction process. Engineers are asked to certify legality, or to look the other way. Buyers are told not to worry.

“It’s prohibition that doesn’t correspond to legality,” she says. “It just creates another wave of illegality.”

And who gets to build legally, with full amenities? Hotels. Large developments. The very entities most capable of negotiating exceptions. “What you’re creating is cartel tourism,” she says. “You take the pools away from the normal villas where people come to for […] a bit of peace and tranquillity.” Tourists that are just looking for relaxation, that do not cram the streets. “Hotels have the right to build 30 rooms, each room with a pool,” Katsipi explains, raising the contradiction.

The real matter is that the island needs to decide what they wish to receive. Elite tourism? Mass tourism? Something in between? It has become clear that it is not possible to do everything at once.

Beneath these debates lies a deeper one about social sustainability. The form of tourism now prevailing in places like Paros has grown beyond unbalanced. It has become extractive.

When wealthy investors flip homes for profit, the local economy doesn’t grow—it inflates. Teachers and nurses can’t find housing. Essential services workers commute from other islands. Meanwhile, those who do buy homes are increasingly absent. “There’s a class of buyers who don’t even want to be here in August,” Katsipi notes. “They come in May-June or September-October. The rest of the time, the house sits empty—or is on Airbnb.”

This is not development. It is simply exponential growth. The distinction matters. Growth adds numbers. Development builds systems. At the moment, Greece has a surplus of the former and a deficit of the latter.

For Katsipi and others, the future of tourism in Greece won’t be determined by one regulation or one real estate deal. It will depend on whether the country—and especially its islands—can resist the temptation to sell everything to everyone. It will require choosing, clearly and collectively, the kind of tourism that is worth sustaining.

“It’s okay to have diversity,” Katsipi says. “But we have to decide where we’re going.”

By Valerio Castellini

At the entrance to modern Delphi, the structure that once hosted the Hotel Apollon sits quiet and empty. Its balconies are rusting, the paint on its facade faded to a dull beige. Shuttered windows overlook an almost deserted square. A small, sun-bleached sign still bears the name of the town’s first tourist establishment. Now it’s a ghost of an ambitious past—a mirror, perhaps, of how Delphi’s present struggles to live up to its legacy. Today, Delphi feels like a stage after the audience has left. 

Today, while the ruins of the ancient Oracle still draw thousands, the modern town of Delphi is quietly crumbling—its fate sealed by the economics of a changing tourism industry.

Second only to the Acropolis, Delphi has long been a cornerstone of Greece’s cultural heritage circuit. Large tourist inflow began in the second half of the 20th century, when Greece was under the dictatorial rule of the Regime of the Colonels. 

Delphi was one of the sites identified by the Xenia project, a program sponsored by the regime that promoted the construction of touristic infrastructure in selected historical locations that would uphold Greece’s image building on its glorious ancient past. It was pure propaganda, but it is representative of the importance of Delphi in antiquity, when it served as the cultural and religious capital for the Hellenic world (and beyond).

Perched on the slopes of Mount Parnassus and overlooking the stunning Pleistos River Valley, it has ever since offered generations of visitors not only the weight of history, but the promise of immersion. In recent years, that promise is fading. 

This is a result of a wider crisis that had been brought up in our conversation with Giorgos Lialios, a journalist at Kathimerini who covers overdevelopment and tourism. “There is an issue with the quality of tourism,” he said. “The tourism industry is not developing—it’s just growing.”

Lialios points to the rise of short-term rentals and low-cost flights, which have made Greece more accessible than ever—but at a cost. Tourists can now easily and affordably spend their vacations here, but they often opt for more superficial activities that in most cases do not touch, or only hastily, cultural destinations.

This is especially harmful for the site of Delphi, which is located off the beaten track for most itineraries. In order to visit Delphi, one must plan specifically in order to include it. It is a three hour (often more) commute from Athens or any other major port of arrival, and clearly, unless vehemently passionate, many will happily disregard it.

This is reflected in data. According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority, Delphi saw a 41% drop in visitors from January to November 2024 compared to the same period the year before—plummeting from over 460,000 to just 284,000. 

Many factors may be at play, but the numbers are too stark to be dismissed.

This has a huge toll on the adjacent town. If overall visitors have decreased, the number of them having an overnight stay is even lower. “Most people come as a day trip from Athens,” said Sophia Theona, a longtime guide at the ancient site. “Not many people spend the night.”

Today, the streets are lined with hotels and souvenir shops—proof of an infrastructure built for crowds that rarely come. Most storefronts are either shuttered or open for only a few hours a day. It’s strangely difficult to find a place to buy groceries, not even a mini-market in sight. The few shops that remain open sell the same plaster statues and fridge magnets found in Plaka or Monastiraki. 

“Businesses are shutting down—they just don’t have enough customers to stay open,” added Sophia.

From behind the counter of an ice cream shop on Delphi’s main street—the only place open in the late afternoon of a Tuesday—36-year-old Iordanis sees the same pattern. “In the spring we get school groups, but they come and go. They might take a walk in town, but they don’t stay.”

A quick informal experiment reinforces these theories. On popular platforms such as Booking.com and Airbnb, the vast majority of properties are still vacant for the coming peak season—most of them being available for same-day bookings. 

For a town built around the expectation of overnight guests, the loss of that rhythm is minatory.

Delphi seems to have lost its individuality, eroded by the very industry it hoped would sustain it. A town that sold its soul for tourism, and that is now facing the consequences of its decline.

It is not necessarily the result of bad choices. Delphi is rather the victim of a change in demand that it has not been able to—and probably would not be—accommodate. The hordes of tourists that arrive on cruise ships daily in Mykonos or Santorini would not find in Delphi what they are looking for. They will rather enjoy an ‘Instagrammable’ spot, or a restaurant disguised as traditional. Most now prefer performative tourism, without any significance or genuine learning behind it.

Tourists now spend less and stay shorter. Just the time to get some good pictures in and tick Greece off their wish-list. 

Good for visitors, maybe. Less so for Greece.

By Valerio Castellini

EX!T. Revolution from Within. Photographed by Julia Tulke. 2018, Exarcheia, Athens, Greece.

In the heat of midday, I am a loner ambling in the streets of Athens. A stray cat crosses the street from time to time, and a gust of wind while I’m turning a corner takes me back to reality from my pensive state. But as I look around to fathom where my aimless rumbling has brought me, I start noticing how every wall is covered in something—layers of graffiti, torn posters, political slogans half scratched out and rewritten. I must have arrived in Exarcheia. 

This neighborhood, long known as the beating heart of Greece’s radical left, feels both alive and hemmed in by the rest of Athens. To understand its present, I spoke with two people shaped by it in very different ways.

One was José Ernesto, a 35-year-old Cuban artist on sabbatical. I found him sitting at a café table, sipping a beer. Every few minutes he paused to greet someone walking by. “Exarcheia is a town inside the city,” he told me. “People don’t like tourists. Everybody knows each other. It’s a tight community.” But it’s not, he said, the political stronghold it once was. “Antifa has become a fashion,” he added. As someone who grew up in a Communist country, he finds local leftist ideals too romanticized: “With communism, you are going to live worse.”

He worries that the new metro station under construction will turn Exarcheia into another Plaka—the clean, curated, and stripped of edge area at the foot of the Acropolis that has long lost its authenticity to serve the superficial needs of the herds of tourists flowing in daily. He sees graffiti as a vital language here, but one that doesn’t speak to outsiders. “It resonates inside the community,” he said, “but doesn’t really reach externals in a significant way.”

And beyond Exarcheia, his concern grows deeper: “Power corrupts people,” he said. “The government is detached. It doesn’t work to actually change things.” Prime Minister Mitsotakis and his centre-right government have not regained trust after the scandals that have hit them, particularly the 2022 ‘Predatorgate’ and the 2023 Tempi train crash. 

To José, people are leaving because staying and fighting feels futile.

That same disillusionment surfaced again when I met EX!T, a street artist who prefers to only be known through his stage name. We met in a quiet café, where he stirred his freddo espresso slowly before speaking. He started tagging at the age of 13, however the EX!T project only started later, in 2013. Just as the refugee crisis was about to begin, eventually peaking in 2015 with the arrival to Greece of over 800,000 migrants and refugees. A deep burden on an already-strained Greece, that faced many difficulties in managing such influx. 

The name EX!T itself reflects a tension between flight and belonging. “I feel like a migrant,” he said. “I never felt I belonged anywhere. My art is about that feeling.”

For him, graffiti isn’t protest in the traditional sense. It’s more personal. “Sometimes, I don’t even know what the message is until months later. It’s my therapy.” He described a moment that stayed with him: while painting some wood on fire on a side street, a migrant man stopped to watch. They exchanged no words—only gestures. The man pointed to his chest, miming a stabbing motion, his eyes full of tears. The image went beyond language. “That moment hit me deeply,” EX!T said. “No words were needed.”

Like José, he fears Exarcheia will lose what makes it matter. “Right now, there’s a balance here,” he said. “But if it becomes mainstream, that will break.”

EX!T also shared a broader frustration with Greece’s political direction: while society may be more open and empathetic than before, “the government feels like the best we could possibly have—because there is no alternative,” he told me. Elections come and go, but little seems to change. Corruption scandals make headlines, but accountability rarely follows. People are tired, but not angry in the streets, just worn down. That gap, he said, is where apathy grows.

As I walked back toward the noise of central Athens, the slogans faded from the walls. But their message stayed with me. Greece is full of voices. The real question is whether anyone is still willing to hear them.