Tradition tours in Santorini
Make a traditional exhibition in Santorini with Santorini tours!
Santorini is one of the islands that have held on their rich tradition over the centuries. Today the tradition of Santorini is kept alive in several aspects of everyday life, mainly through traditional products and through festivals.
The historical vineyards of Santorini
Both the local products and the festivals of Santorini maintain an unbroken line of life with the past of the island, both recent and distant. It is a fact that the cultivation and production of wine in Santorini was already known to the inhabitants of the prehistoric settlement of Akrotiri, something that was known to the public from the excavations.
This means that already in 1700 BC in Santorini, people drank the same (naturally) wine that fills the glasses of locals and visitors today. It is even certain that the current vineyard of Santorini is the continuation of that, which was planted on the island after the Minoan eruption of the volcano, around 1200 BC. Therefore it is about 3200 years old!
You can enjoy the combination of history and tradition in Santorini by booking now a Santorini historical tour.
The traditional products of Santorini
Feta, barley, anhydrous tomato, goat and other products produced by this dry and soiled (and at the same time endowed) land of Santorini, are among the finest and most sophisticated flavors of Greece.
The tradition of most of these crops also starts from prehistoric times, with the famous frescoes of Akrotiri Krokosyclektery demonstrating that in the 17th century BC the Santorinians knew this rare plant and exploited it.
At the feasts of the island, one can still see today how the tradition of centuries is kept alive through the spirit of the people. The music played by local organists with their traditional instruments, the food that is shared by the faithful and has lived for decades, the joy of which small and large people participate, proves that tradition continues unceasingly. You can take a tour in Santorini anytime!
The Santorini Traditional Products, One by One
The island grows almost nothing in quantity and everything it grows is concentrated. These are the santorini traditional products that actually come from this soil, what each one is, and how to tell the real thing from the version made for visitors.
The cherry tomato. The tomataki Santorinis is small, dense, dark and intensely sweet, grown entirely without irrigation on volcanic ash. It carries Protected Designation of Origin status, and of all the santorini traditional products it is the one that tastes least like its supermarket equivalent.
Fava, the rarest of the santorini traditional products. Not a broad bean and not a chickpea. Santorini fava is Lathyrus clymenum, a legume grown almost nowhere else, split and cooked to a purée that is served warm with raw onion and oil. It also holds PDO status.
The white aubergine, one of the rarer santorini traditional products. Pale, almost seedless, sweeter and less bitter than the purple kind, and usually eaten fried or in a salad rather than baked.
The caper, one of the wild santorini traditional products. Both the bud and the leaf, gathered from bushes growing straight out of the cliff walls, salted or in brine. The caper leaf is the version most visitors have never seen and the one worth carrying home.
Chloro cheese. A fresh soft goat cheese, made on the island in small quantities, sharp and slightly sour. It is the hardest of the santorini traditional products to find outside the island because it does not travel.
Katsouni, one of the nearly lost santorini traditional products. A pale local cucumber that is eaten ripe, when it tastes closer to a melon than a cucumber. Very rare now, and mostly grown by households rather than commercially.
Barley and the rusks, the oldest everyday santorini traditional products. The dry barley rusk, softened with tomato and oil, is the base of the local salad and a direct survival of what people ate here when there was no water for wheat.
Saffron. Not produced commercially today, but the Akrotiri frescoes show crocus gathering in the seventeenth century BC, which makes it the oldest documented of all the santorini traditional products.
Assyrtiko, the best known of the santorini traditional products. The white grape the island is known for: high acid, mineral, bone dry, grown on ungrafted vines that predate phylloxera.
Vinsanto. Sun-dried Assyrtiko and Aidani, pressed after weeks on straw mats and aged for years in barrel. Sweet, dark and nothing like the Italian wine with a similar name.
Nykteri. The old style of white, picked at night and fermented longer in wood, rounder than a modern Assyrtiko.
Capers in vinegar, tomato paste and sun-dried tomato. The preserved versions of the santorini traditional products, made because the fresh ones last days and the season is short.
Tomatokeftedes. Tomato fritters. Not an ingredient but the dish that exists because the tomato is too small to slice and too good to waste.
Melitinia. Small sweet cheese pastries made at Easter, one of the santorini traditional products you will only find at the right time of year.
Koufeto. A white almond and marrow spoon sweet, served at weddings, and still made in the villages.
Why This Island Produces What It Produces
None of this is a marketing story. The santorini traditional products taste the way they do because of a specific set of physical conditions that exist almost nowhere else, and every one of them is a consequence of the eruption.
No rivers and no springs behind the santorini traditional products. Santorini has no surface water at all. Every drop of drinking water is desalinated or shipped, and agriculture here has never had irrigation.
The soil under the santorini traditional products is ash. Layers of pumice and volcanic ash from 1600 BC, porous, mineral-rich and almost without organic matter. Roots go deep and yields stay tiny.
Night humidity does the watering. Sea mist settles after dark and the porous ash holds it. That is the entire water supply for most of the santorini traditional products grown here.
Low yield and high concentration in the santorini traditional products. A vine here produces a fraction of what the same vine would give on the mainland. The sugars, acids and flavour compounds concentrate in what little there is.
The wind that shapes the santorini traditional products. The meltemi is strong enough to destroy an unprotected crop, which is why the vines are trained into baskets and the fields are low and walled.
The basket vine. Koulouri or ampelia: the cane is woven into a circular nest on the ground and the fruit grows inside it, sheltered from wind and sun and gathering dew. It is a training system found nowhere else in the world and it is the reason the wine among the santorini traditional products is unique.
Ungrafted, pre-phylloxera vines. The louse that destroyed Europe’s vineyards in the nineteenth century cannot survive in this sand. Santorini’s vines are on their own roots, and some root systems are centuries old.
Everything grows small. The tomato, the caper, the fava, the cucumber. Size on this island is a function of water, and there is none.
The dry-farmed difference. Without irrigation the plant concentrates rather than swells, which is the whole explanation for why the santorini traditional products are more intense than their mainland equivalents.
The protected designations. The cherry tomato and the fava both carry EU Protected Designation of Origin status, which legally restricts the name to produce grown on the island.
The PDO for the wine. Santorini PDO covers Assyrtiko-dominant whites and Vinsanto, with rules on grape, yield and ageing.
The land is shrinking. Vineyard area on the island has fallen substantially over the last fifty years as land became worth more with a hotel on it. This is the real pressure on the santorini traditional products, not fashion.
The labour behind the santorini traditional products. Basket vines cannot be machine-harvested and caper bushes grow on cliffs. Every one of these crops is hand-worked, which sets the price.
Why it matters when you buy. Real santorini traditional products are expensive because the yield is tiny and the work is manual. Anything sold cheaply in volume is almost certainly not from here.
Where to Buy Them, and What to Avoid
Fira’s main street sells a great deal that is not from Santorini at all. Buying the real santorini traditional products is not difficult, but it does mean walking past the first twenty shops you see.
The cooperative, the honest source for santorini traditional products. The island’s producers’ union sells fava, tomato products, capers and wine at prices set by people who grow them rather than by a shop on the caldera rim.
The wineries, where the santorini traditional products are cheapest. Eight estates take visitors and all of them sell their own bottles at the cellar door, usually below the price of the same wine in a village shop.
Village grocers who stock santorini traditional products. Pyrgos, Megalochori, Emporio, Karterados and Messaria. The shops that serve residents carry the santorini traditional products residents actually buy.
The tomato museum at Vlychada. The old cannery keeps a small shop, and the setting explains the product better than any label.
Producers directly. Several caper and fava growers sell from the farm. This is where the freshest of the santorini traditional products are, and the prices are the lowest on the island.
What to check on a santorini traditional products label. The PDO mark for fava and for the cherry tomato, and a producer address on the island rather than a mainland distributor.
The fava test. Real Santorini fava is a pale yellow, uniform, and cooks to a smooth purée in about forty minutes. Yellow split peas sold as fava are common and much cheaper.
The caper test. Ask whether the leaves are included. Caper leaves are a Santorini speciality and importers rarely carry them.
The wine test. Look for Santorini PDO on the label. A bottle marked simply as Greek white is not one of the santorini traditional products regardless of the picture on the front.
What is usually not local. Most olive oil. The island has very few olive trees and the oil sold in tourist shops here comes from Crete or the Peloponnese, which is fine as long as nobody pretends otherwise.
Also usually not local. Honey in volume, most herbs, and anything in decorative packaging at a price that seems too good.
Pumice and cosmetics. Volcanic soaps and scrubs are sold everywhere and sit outside the category of santorini traditional products entirely. Enjoy them, but do not mistake them for food heritage.
Prices to expect for santorini traditional products. Fava and capers cost several times what a mainland legume costs, and a bottle of Assyrtiko at the cellar door is not cheap. That is the yield, not the markup.
Buy at the end. Carrying jars around the island for four days is unnecessary. Everything keeps and almost every producer is within twenty minutes of the airport.
The honest summary. The best santorini traditional products are sold by the people who grew them, at the place they were grown, and are almost never on the first shelf you walk past in Fira.
The Vineyard: Three Thousand Years of One Product
The wine deserves its own section, because it is the oldest continuously produced of the santorini traditional products and the only one with an unbroken documented line back to the Bronze Age.
The Akrotiri evidence for the santorini traditional products. Wine production was already established at the prehistoric settlement before the eruption, which the excavation made clear. People here were drinking wine in the seventeenth century BC.
The replanting. The present vineyard descends from vines planted after the Minoan eruption, which puts a figure of roughly three thousand two hundred years on the continuity of this particular one of the santorini traditional products.
Assyrtiko, the grape behind the santorini traditional products. High acidity that survives the heat, a saline mineral character from the ash, and enough structure to age for a decade. It is the grape that made the island’s modern reputation.
Aidani and Athiri. The two other white varieties, softer and more aromatic, usually blended with Assyrtiko rather than bottled alone.
Mavrotragano and Mandilaria. The reds, nearly lost and now being replanted, and the least known of the wine santorini traditional products.
Nykteri. Literally “of the night”, from picking in the dark to keep the fruit cool, then a longer fermentation in wood.
Vinsanto, the rarest of the wine santorini traditional products. Grapes sun-dried on mats for one to two weeks, pressed, then aged in barrel for years. Dark, sweet, with the acidity still underneath it, and the island’s most distinctive bottle.
The basket vines that carry the santorini traditional products. Woven low against the wind, gathering dew inside the nest, and impossible to harvest by machine. Every bunch is cut by hand.
The canaves. Traditional underground wineries cut into the pumice, cool all year without power. The wine museum in the cave at Koutsoyannopoulos lays the whole working year out underground and is the best single explanation of these santorini traditional products on the island.
Eight estates take visitors. Most run tastings through the afternoon, and a private wine tour solves the one practical problem, which is that somebody has to drive.
What has changed. Vineyard area has fallen sharply as land values rose. Assyrtiko is now planted in Australia and California, but the ungrafted basket vines on ash exist only here.
What to taste side by side. A young Assyrtiko, an oaked one, a Nykteri and a Vinsanto. Four glasses cover the whole range of the wine santorini traditional products and take about an hour.
Which santorini traditional products to bring home. Vinsanto travels best and is the hardest to find abroad. A good Assyrtiko is now available in most European cities; a small-estate Mavrotragano is not.
How it connects to the rest. The same ash, the same absence of water and the same wind produce the tomato, the fava and the caper. The wine is simply the one that the world noticed first.
The Year of the Harvest, Month by Month
Almost everything here has a short window, and a visitor who arrives in the wrong month will find several of the santorini traditional products only in jars. This is the working calendar of the island.
January and February. Pruning in the vineyards, the canaves quiet, and the fields bare. Nothing fresh, but the cellars are at their most interesting and the estates have time to talk.
March. The first wild greens, and the vines beginning to move. Caper bushes still dormant on the cliffs.
April. The island turns green, the first flowers open on the capers, and the Easter baking brings out melitinia. Several santorini traditional products appear only in this fortnight.
May, when the santorini traditional products start coming in. Caper harvest begins, buds picked by hand before they open, and the fava is coming in from the fields.
June, when the santorini traditional products come in. Fava threshing and the first cherry tomatoes. The vineyard is in full leaf inside the baskets.
July. The tomato peak, and the earliest grape harvest in Greece begins in the last week. Capers are still being gathered.
August, the hardest month for the santorini traditional products. The main vendemmia, by hand, usually starting before dawn to keep the fruit cool. The busiest month for the wine santorini traditional products and the hardest one to visit comfortably.
The Vinsanto mats. Bunches laid out in the sun for one to two weeks after picking, usually in August. It is the most photogenic stage of any of the santorini traditional products and it is over quickly.
September, the calmest month for santorini traditional products. Pressing and fermentation, white aubergine still in the fields, and the calmest month to see a working winery.
October. The last of the tomatoes, the new wine settling, and the island slowing down.
November and December. Rain, the first bottling of the young whites, and household work: rusks, preserves and spoon sweets.
What is available all year. The preserved santorini traditional products — fava, sun-dried tomato, tomato paste, capers in salt or brine, and every wine.
What is not. Fresh tomato outside high summer, chloro cheese in quantity, katsouni at any predictable time, and melitinia outside Easter.
The practical conclusion. Come in June or September if you want to see the santorini traditional products being made rather than sold. Come in August if you want the harvest, and accept the heat that goes with it.
Santorini Traditional Products: The Questions We Are Asked
What are the santorini traditional products worth buying? Fava, capers and caper leaves, sun-dried tomato or tomato paste, Vinsanto, and a bottle of Assyrtiko. Everything else is optional.
Is Santorini fava the same as the fava sold elsewhere in Greece? No. It is a different plant, Lathyrus clymenum, and it carries PDO status. Most fava sold in Greece is yellow split pea.
Why is the tomato so small? No irrigation. The fruit never swells, so everything concentrates, which is the whole principle behind the santorini traditional products.
Can I take food home on a plane? Jars and vacuum packs go in hold luggage without difficulty within the EU. Liquids over a hundred millilitres cannot go in the cabin, which includes wine and oil.
Will the cheese survive the journey? Chloro will not. It is fresh, it is soft and it is meant to be eaten within days.
Are the santorini traditional products expensive? Yes, relative to mainland equivalents. Hand-worked, dry-farmed, tiny-yield crops on land that is worth a fortune.
Where is the cheapest place to buy? The cooperative and the producers themselves. The most expensive is a gift shop on the caldera rim.
Is the olive oil local? Almost never. The island has very few olive trees.
When is the harvest? Grapes in late July and August, earlier than anywhere else in Greece. Tomatoes in high summer, capers from late spring.
Can I see the vines up close? Yes. Every winery visit includes them, and the basket training is worth seeing even if you do not drink.
What should I eat rather than buy? Tomatokeftedes, fava with onion, white aubergine, chloro and the barley rusk salad. The santorini traditional products are better on the island than in a suitcase.
Are there festivals around them? Yes, village panigiria through the summer with local music and shared food, which is where the products and the customs meet.
Is there a cooking class? Several, and they are the fastest way to understand why these ingredients are cooked the way they are.
Seeing the Products Where They Grow
The inland route. Pyrgos, Megalochori and Emporio sit among the vineyards and the fields, and this is where the santorini traditional products are actually produced rather than sold.
Santorini traditional products in one afternoon. Four to five hours covers two estates and a producer, with the driving handled.
The tomato museum. The Vlychada cannery, kept as it was left in the 1980s, with the machinery in place.
The wine museum. Underground, cool, and a complete explanation of the working year.
What we will tell you. Which shops are worth your time, which producers sell direct, and which of the santorini traditional products are genuinely better here than at home. Send us your dates and we will build the afternoon around what you actually want to taste.
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