Oia

Oia is one of the most significant traditional settlements in Europe. It used to be one of the five Castles of Santorini, known as Saint Nicholas Castle, and its settlement was known as Epanomeria.
Today Oia comprises a residential mixture of neoclassical houses, belonging to the captains and ship owners, and underground houses built within the lava, belonging to the seafarers and the laborers. This peculiar infusion, with the thousands of steps that unravel enigmatically like tree branches, is recorded in detail through the lens of Yannis Yannelos. The details are transformed into paintings, creating new colours and new aesthetic pleasures, resting on the endless blue that goes as far as the eye can see.
Even in the most beautiful place on earth, if you allow your eyes to roam on detail, you are bound to discover a different world, which vindicates all those who believe that the miniscule is beautiful and the grand marvellous.
Oia is a place of contradictory compositions; from a multicultural and geographical aspect, all sorts of things have been recorded here: nations and religions, conquerors and defeated, lords and servants, earth and lava, a colourful mosaic of myths and narrations. Its oldest structures, the Castle of Saint Nicholas, residence of the Venetian aristocracy, and the Orthodox church of Aghia Ekaterina, which miraculously still stands tall, after so many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions since 1600, testify to the fact that here, in this settlement coexist all periods, with their vestiges. If Santorini is a place of immeasurable beauty and history, the diachronic Oia is its far removed Homeric halo. [...]