Klima and its syrmata

Klima is a fishing settlement below Tripiti where the houses sit directly on the water and the ground floor of each one is a syrma: a garage cut into the rock where the boat was winched up for the winter, its door painted a different colour from its neighbours. The result is a fifty-metre strip of red, yellow, turquoise and blue against white walls and grey stone.

The timing is fixed by geography. The row faces west across the gulf, so through the morning it sits in its own shadow and the colours read as muddy; from about five the sun comes straight onto the doors and everything saturates. Stay for the sunset over the water and the whole row goes warm.

Klima is lived in, not a museum. The strip in front of the doors is a working quay and, in places, somebody's terrace: keep the setup small, do not sit on the boats, and ask before shooting in a doorway. Parking is very limited at the bottom, so most photographers park in Tripiti and walk down the steep road — five minutes down, more coming back.