Santorini’s Canava Distillery Transporting visitors to a time before the tourists.
H
uman settlement on the Greek Isle of Santorini goes back five thousand years. It’s a history filled with tragic natural disasters and epic conquests, but that’s easy to forget when visiting this bustling tourist destination. As today’s Santorini is besieged by jet-setting Instagrammers and cruise ship passengers by the tens of thousands every year, what gets lost among the restaurants and resorts is that before Santorini’s recent
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WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY CARRIE DOW
tourism boom, island life was about simplicity and struggle. A local ouzo distillery houses a museum to show visitors what that life was like before the world ‘discovered’ Santorini. Canava Distillery, in Mesaria on the eastern slopes near the main port of Fira, was founded in 1974 by Evagellos Lygnos; the distillery had roots in Santorini’s wine industry because Lygnos first worked for the Venetsanou family winery in the 1960s. A ‘canava’ was a
room inside Fira’s famous cliffside cave houses where families stored wine and coal. Today these cave houses are high-end hotels with infinity pools. After learning an ouzo recipe from a distiller from Smryna (now Izmir, Turkey), Evagellos opened Canava and taught his son Loukas the ropes, with the youth making his first ouzo batch at age 11. In 1997 Loukas took over and today Canava remains the 101