Koskinou

This guide to Koskinou, a hillside village on Rhodes, opens with a ceramist's question about how many shades of blue it takes to get one plate right, and traces Vasilis Kakios's father, who hand-mixed glazes at the old Ikaros ceramics factory from 1949 into the 1980s. It follows what those painted plates meant once they left the kiln, hung floor to ceiling on a wall called the stolisia that announced a family's standing in the village. It also looks down at the black-and-white pebble mosaics, the hohlaki craft, patterning the courtyards underfoot, and up at the fortress-like walls a Knights' decree ordered built here as early as 1474.