GREECE'S NEW IT ISLAND

Tinos has long drawn artists and religious pilgrims but has mostly flown under the radar for the elite traveller. That's about to change.

- Julie Belcove

Just below the crest of a mountain on Tinos, in Greece’s Cycladic archipelago, sturdy oak trees are bent low to the ground, the near-constant northern winds sculpting their trunks and branches into bizarre, gravity-defying poses. Known as the Meltemi, these winds have occupied an outsized place in the Tinian psyche since antiquity, when a myth arose to explain them: Hercules, angry at Boreas for killing his friend, took revenge on the god of the north wind by killing Boreas’s children on Tinos. The grieving and enraged father, in turn, unleashed his fierce gales to blow on the rocky landscape for all eternity.

Today, the Meltemi make the scorching summer sun bearable and keep the grapes in the vineyards from overheating. They whip up surfable waves at Kolymbithra beach, in an Aegean Sea that is otherwise as placid as a swimming pool, and help deter cruise ships and superyachts from encroaching on this low-key haven where wild goats roam the unspoilt terrain and stray cats patrol the convivial public squares.