Greek Pastries, Waterfalls and Ancient Trails: A Sisters’ Adventure in Evia
When twin sisters Margaret and Abby set out to plan a long-overdue trip together, they weren’t looking for a week beside a hotel pool. Raised on active family holidays and long-distance childhood hikes, the pair wanted something that combined adventure, culture and enough free time to enjoy a chilled drink with a sea view.
What they found on our Walking the Mountains & Villages of Evia trip was all that and considerably more.
Often described as “the Greece Greeks keep to themselves”, Evia remains one of the country’s lesser-known islands. Lying just off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland, it’s a place of rugged mountains, remote villages, ancient history and coastlines washed by the Aegean Sea. For Margaret and Abby, it exceeded even their highest expectations.
Abby had dreamt of visiting Greece since studying Greek mythology at school, while Margaret explains: “We wanted something active, I personally get a little bored after a day of just sitting around.”
The fact Exodus handled the logistics was another major draw.
“We both work full-time, so we wanted something that had everything taken care of,” Margaret explains. “This fit the bill.”
It was also their first guided group trip together.
“We spent a good amount of time looking at different organisations,” Margaret says. “This one just kept reappearing.”
Exodus, however, wasn’t entirely new to Margaret. The introduction had happened in an unlikely place: Montreal Airport.
“I was waiting for a flight to Casablanca for another trail running trip and got chatting to a group of British travellers,” she says. “They were going on an Exodus trip. I’d never heard of Exodus before, so I looked it up right there in the airport on my phone and thought it looked interesting.”
“Margaret came back from Morocco adamant, ‘Let’s do a trip together, let’s do a trip together,'” Abby laughs. “Then we found a Black Friday deal and thought, ‘Okay, we’re doing it.'”
“The website was very easy to navigate,” says Margaret. “The itineraries were transparent. You knew what to expect. And a lot of other companies had extra costs for activities, whereas Exodus included everything just like they said they would.”
The trails were exactly what the sisters had hoped for.
Along several routes, natural springs emerged from the mountainside, allowing hikers to refill their water bottles with fresh spring water.
“I thought that was cool,” says Margaret. “You could just stop and fill your bottle with mountain water. It felt like something people had been doing for hundreds of years.”
What they hadn’t anticipated was just how much they would learn along the way.
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Walking the Mountains & Villages of Evia
Discover Evia with walks through coastal paths, forests and gorges
Much of that was down to Thanos.
Margaret says, “He was like a breathing podcast. He’d tell you all the history along each trail and give such an in-depth insight into the background of the area, the culture and everything.”
A leisurely walk near Marmari proved the point perfectly. Looking out across the Aegean, Thanos seemed to have a story for every island.
“One island had belonged to a Russian tsar and now belonged to Bill Gates,” Margaret recalls. “Then another would lead into a story about the Greek dictatorship.”
His enthusiasm was also infectious.
At one waterfall stop, Thanos asked Margaret to film him running under the water. Watching from the sidelines, she decided it looked too much fun not to join in. Abby followed quickly afterwards. That’s the Thanos effect.
Abby says, “He was just an absolute dynamo. The energy and enthusiasm he brought to everything – Greek culture and history in particular – was incredible. Especially when you consider he’s been doing this for so long. You’d think it was his first tour with the passion he brought to it.”
Along the trails, local dogs would appear when he called “Ella, ella” – Greek for “come, come” – happily joining the group for part of the walk. Villagers greeted him by name, fellow walkers stopped to chat, and it became apparent that Thanos wasn’t simply guiding in Evia; he was part of the island’s fabric.
Another thing the group learned quickly was that Thanos viewed terrain through a slightly different lens.
“He’d say, ‘This next section is flat, easy walking,'” Margaret laughs. “And then it would be up, down, up, down.”
Before long, the group had coined a new phrase: Thanos flat.
It became shorthand for a route that was perhaps a little more adventurous than advertised. The joke resurfaced throughout the week, usually whenever a supposedly gentle stretch of trail revealed another climb around the corner.
But it was all part of the energy he brought to the trip.
Every evening, as the group gathered around restaurant tables, Thanos would patiently guide them through Greek menus line by line, explaining local dishes and making recommendations.
By the end of the week, they had sampled everything from fresh seafood and baklava dripping with honey to spanakopita, creamy tzatziki and local spirits such as Metaxa.
One of the most anticipated daily rituals became elevenses.
“Everyone would ask, ‘Thanos, what do you have in that bag today?'” Margaret laughs. “And he’d always say, ‘You’ll find out at 11 o’clock.'”
Among the treats that emerged was kolokithopita, a traditional pumpkin pie wrapped in delicate filo pastry. Filled with pumpkin and fragrant spices, it quickly became a group favourite, prompting people in the group to swap recipes in the WhatsApp chat long after returning home.
Food quickly became one of the sisters’ highlights, helped in no small part by Thanos’ habit of steering the group towards dishes they might otherwise have overlooked.
After trying delicious mushrooms at Taverna Cavo D’Oro, a local favourite that Maria from the base hotel firmly recommended, Thanos took the group to a restaurant that he described as being owned by the Greek equivalent of Gordon Ramsay. Several people, including Abby, still talk about one particular salad.
“It was such a unique combination,” she says. “It had ricotta, strawberries, rocket, shards of filo pastry and then a scoop of frozen lemon sorbet in the middle.”
Away from the restaurant tables, Evia continued to reveal its history in remarkable ways.
Following ancient marble paths into the mountains, the group reached the ancient Roman marble quarries on Mount Ohi, where 10 enormous cipollino marble columns still lie abandoned on the hillside nearly 2,000 years after they were carved.
“The size of them was incredible,” Abby says. “But what got me was hearing how they cut the marble and transported it.”
As Thanos explained, quarry workers carefully followed the natural grain of the distinctive green-and-white marble before shaping it into monumental columns destined for the Roman Empire.
Once completed, they had to move the enormous monoliths down the mountainside and transport them across the sea to Italy. “You’re standing there thinking, how did they actually do that?” Abby says. “How do you carry something like that on a ship?”
Asked what moment they’d go back to tomorrow if they could, both sisters say they’d return to the same place: the marble pillars on Mount Ohi.
Abby said, “Being up there was kind of magical. You had the natural history, the human history and everything together in one place.”
Margaret agrees, “I just remember sitting with one of the pastries from Thanos’ bag, listening to goat herd bells and looking out across the mountains.”
“It made me laugh because I remembered Thanos explaining earlier in the week that shepherds place one bell on the lead goat – the fastest one – so the rest of the herd wouldn’t get lost.”
The irony wasn’t lost on them. After all, they’d spent the week happily following Thanos across Evia.
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