The bus pulled into Arachova just after lunch, and the first thing I noticed wasn't the stone houses or the clock tower on its rock — it was the air. Cool, pine-scented, almost crisp. After ten days of Athens in August, that air felt like a handshake from a friend. I stepped off the KTEL bus onto the main road, the one narrow artery that winds through the village, and I swear I heard the cicadas quiet down for a second, as if even they were taking a breath.
I'd booked a room at the Likoria Hotel, a mid-range place right near the center, and the woman at reception handed me a key without asking for a passport scan or a deposit. Just a smile and a 'yassou'. I dropped my bag, opened the window, and let the mountain breeze fill the room. The hotel costs around eighty euros a night — not cheap, but this is a ski town, and August is the quiet season, so prices are softer than they'll be in January.
I stepped back onto the main road and just started walking. Arachova is a labyrinth of cobbled alleys and stone houses with slate roofs, all climbing the slope of Parnassus. I passed a bakery with trays of spinach pies in the window, a shop selling flokati rugs so thick they looked like they'd swallow your foot, and a cluster of cafés where the older men sat outside with their komboloi beads, watching the world not move too fast.
I came to Lakka Square, the village's paved heart, and sat down at a café called Patron arachova — the name's a bit circular, but the freddo cappuccino was exactly right. Three euros, maybe three and a half. I watched the light change on the mountainside, that particular August light that feels thick and golden even when the sky is overcast. The weather forecast says twenty-two to twenty-nine degrees today, and it feels like that — warm in the sun, cool in the shade.
After coffee, I walked up the Engarsios steps. Two hundred and sixty-four of them, carved into the upper town, with the stone houses pressing close on either side. The steps were opened in 1927, and they climb past old mansions with wooden balconies and flower pots spilling geraniums. At the top, the Church of Agios Georgios sits on its knoll, all white stone and a bell tower that looks out over the whole village and the valley beyond.
I stood there for a while, catching my breath, and I thought about the clock tower. From my vantage point I could see it on its sheet of rock — the symbol of this village, built in the eighteenth century, flattened by the 1870 earthquake, bombed by the Germans in 1944, and rebuilt both times. That rock below it was used for centuries as a natural refrigerator, aging the local cheeses in the cool air that funneled up from the gorge. I like that: a village that keeps its cheese in a rock and its history in a tower.
But I didn't come all the way to Arachova just for the views, or the cool air, or the coffee. Nine kilometers down the road, tucked into the same mountain, is one of the most important archaeological sites on earth. So the next morning, I caught the local bus toward Delphi.
The road drops and curves through olive groves, and then you see it — the Sanctuary of Apollo, sprawling across the terraces, with the valley of olive trees falling away below and the Gulf of Corinth glinting on the horizon. The Temple of Apollo is mostly fallen columns now, but the Sacred Way still winds up the slope, lined with the bases where city-states once set their treasuries. I walked it slowly, trying to imagine the processions that came to ask the oracle a question.
The museum is a short walk up from the site, and it's one of those places where you keep staring because you can't quite believe what you're looking at. The Charioteer of Delphi — that bronze figure, standing with his eyes inlaid and his robes still holding their pleats, almost two and a half thousand years old. I stood in front of him for a long time. The combined ticket for the site and museum is around twenty euros, and for once I felt like the money had bought something beyond just a view.
I spent the rest of the day on a bench above the sanctuary, reading the story of the Pythia and her prophecies. The details are hazy — historians still argue about whether she was high on ethylene gas or just good at ambiguity — but the power of the place isn't in the mechanism. It's in the weight of all those centuries of questions. People came from all over the known world, climbed this mountain, and asked their futures. And the mountain, in its way, answered.
Back in Arachova that evening, I was hungry in that bone-deep way you get after a day of ruins and mountain air. I found a taverna near the clock tower — I think the sign read 'To Roloi', which just means 'the clock' — and ordered a local specialty: kokoras krasatos me hilopites, rooster braised in red wine with egg pasta. Around fourteen euros, and worth every one. The meat fell off the bone, the wine sauce was dark and slightly sweet, and the hilopites soaked it up like they were built for it.
With it I ordered a local cheese I'd been hearing about ever since I booked this leg of the trip. Formaela — it's a PDO cheese, which means only the shepherds up here can make it. You grill it and drizzle it with Parnassus thyme honey, and it comes out salty and sweet and a little squeaky under the teeth. The taverna charged about nine euros for the plate, and I almost ordered a second one. The waiter — a man who looked like he'd been working there since the 1980s — laughed and brought me a glass of the local wine without asking. That's filoxenia, right there. It doesn't need explaining.
I walked back to the hotel through the quiet streets, past the Ethnographic Museum of Arachova, which I'd skipped that morning but made a note to visit tomorrow. The town has this particular hum in August — not the frantic buzz of winter, when the skiers take over and the locals call it the 'Winter Mykonos', but a lower, easier rhythm. Families out for an evening walk. The kafeneia still half-full. A couple of kids kicking a ball in the square. The bus from Athens had dropped me here for a reason, and I was starting to understand it.
The plan for the next few days: a day trip to the Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas, about twenty-five kilometers away — UNESCO-listed and, I'm told, one of the finest examples of Middle Byzantine architecture anywhere. Then an attempt at the hike up to the Livadi plateau, a high meadow above the tree line where the shepherds take their flocks in summer. I'll need to rent a car for the monastery, since the buses are scarce out that way, and I'll ask at the hotel about the trail conditions.
Tonight, though, I'm sitting on the small balcony of my hotel room, listening to the village settle into sleep. The clock tower chimes on the hour, and the sound drifts across the rooftops. Tomorrow, maybe, I'll go looking for the mountain's caves — the Corycian Cave, sacred to Pan and the nymphs, sits somewhere up the slopes, and the E4 long-distance trail runs from Arachova toward it and beyond. I've never been one for long hikes, but the air up here makes you want to move. There's a lightness in your chest that Athens never gives you.
In a week, it'll be the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin — the Assumption — and every village in Greece will be throwing its own panigyri, with tables groaning under food and music until the small hours. Arachova will celebrate, I'm sure, with its own particular style. I may still be here for it. Or I may have moved on, following the mountains north toward Metsovo and the Pindos range, where the air gets even cooler and the roads get even steeper.
The rents up here are a good reminder of how seasonal this place is. I saw a listing for a small one-bedroom flat, six months' lease, going for around five and a half thousand euros — about nine hundred a month. That's more than I paid for my place in Koukaki, and this is a village of under three thousand people. But you're paying for the air, the views, the stone alleys, and the fact that you can walk to Delphi in a day. Whether that's worth nine hundred euros a month is a question I can't answer for you. For now, I'm just glad I packed a warm jumper.
The meltemi usually blows over the Aegean in August, but up here on the mountain, the wind that moves the pines is gentler, a steady breath from the north. I'm told that in a few weeks, the crowds will thin out even more, the ski lifts will close for the season, and the village will go quiet in that particular way that mountain towns do between tourist seasons. I think I'd like to see that. But first, Delphi. Hosios Loukas. The Livadi plateau. A stone staircase at 2,000 meters, and the silence that comes with it.
I'll send you a postcard from the next stop. For now, this is Nikos, in Arachova, on the slopes of Parnassus, watching the clock tower glow against the darkening sky. Yassou.