Tinos Dovecotes

Location: Tarabados

Interspersed around the valleys and traditional villages stand a number of singular, fortress-like structures that make the Tinian countryside look like a veritable open-air museum of folk architecture: they are the intricately designed dovecotes of Tinos.

Springing out of a need to procure high-quality nourishment, as well as manure for the crops, the systematic breeding of doves is believed to have been introduced to the island by the Venetians, who ruled Tinos between 1204 and 1715. Initially, the right to breed pigeons was reserved for Venetian nobles; however, after the island was occupied by the Ottomans in the early 18th century, it was also granted to Greeks who owned plots of land. Thus, columbaries evolved into a sign of superior status and financial prosperity, while the local architects were, at last, free to display all their creative ingenuity.

Dovecotes were usually built in the countryside at carefully selected locations near cultivated fields, where water is easily available. They can be found mainly on hillslopes, facing downwind to make takeoffs and landings easier for the doves. Constructed with local shale, they are typically two-story structures that reach 3 meters in length, 3 in width and 5 in height. The lower level was used to store utensils and other items, while the upper level was where the pigeons nested. Each could house 50 pairs of doves and yield as many as 200 kilos of meat and 500 kilos of dry manure per year. Thus, they are probably why Tinos is one of the most fertile areas in Greece; even as far back as 1701, the traveler Pitton de Tournefort wrote that Tinos was "the best-cultivated island" in the Aegean.

The lee sides are decorated with geometric patterns including triangles, circles, rhombuses and squares that form small niches where the doves could rest, sheltered from the sun, the wind and the rain. Remarkably, these patterns differ in each dovecote, so that not one of them is exactly the same as the others.

Today, the number of traditional dovecotes in Tinos is estimated between 600 and 1,000, with most of the surviving structures dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. The vast majority is concentrated in the central and eastern parts of Tinos, in verdant valleys like Agapi, Potamia, or Livada. A cluster of around 20 dovecotes near the traditional village of Tarabados has even been restored and ranks among the most beautiful buildings on the entire island, while yet more can be found near Komi, Krokos and Kardiani.