OR rollerite It is one of the most special features of the Cycladic landscape. With the wise simplicity of its construction, which gives it a miraculous endurance of time, it stands to remind you of the taste and mastery of the craftsmen who created it. Rolling stone They are the stone walls that hold the terraces on the islands forming the horizontal arable cultivated levels.
Dragons are made of the mantras and fences that divide properties, windscreen define the cobbled streets and trailsfrom the dry stone manufacture are manufactured stablesthe pigeonthe Patriarchs, the residences and other countryside buildings.
In terms of construction, they are built only with stone, without any connecting material (such as cement or mud) to join them and therefore requires a great deal of art to make them properly made and not collapsed. The central logic of the creation of the terrace is The exploitation of stones In each field, so that after first cleansing, the walls and retaining walls are created.
The shape, texture and color of the dry stone depend on the characteristics of the stone it is made with. So we come across dark stones that are easily torn (slabs), marble texture stones, brown stones, etc., forming different morphology and style of windscreen. To Parosat the end of the dry stone enters large stones,“The lids”, who with their volume and weight prevent them from below stones from scattering when the goats attempt to overcome them while in the Andros and Kythnoswhere there are large plates, placed upright, -The so -called “Our Lady”– To save materials and working time.
The slides create the gaps between them, where they live in different species of lizards, snakes, snails, spiders and large cavities hosts, rodents, and even birds in the large cavities. A entire habitat It is maintained between the stone stones, protected there from the hot summer sun and collaborates with the crops on the terraces, giving protection to plants from illnesses and parasites!
The slopes are made of the most characteristic features of the Cyclades landscape and the Aegean islands in general, the impressive semi -mountainous land formations, the so -called terraces (hemits, strips, octaves, spots). It is the rare beauty creation of the human labor to turn the barren slopes into arable land to ensure its food. They are true works of art, tied harmoniously with the environment, to the point that they can see as a result of a natural process rather than human intervention, and it is no coincidence that Our great poet George Seferis called them “Earth Wrinkles”.
These miraculous works have demanded centuries -old manual work, which is why the terraces are also called “hemits”, from the much blood that was spilled for their construction. The terraces hold the rain water by performing a double task: on the one hand they do not let the fertile ground be corroded and dragged into the sea and, on the other, hold the precious water, which will later end up in torrents, having first watered the soil. On the terraces or terraces, the islanders cultivated almost everything: vegetables, wheat, barley, legumes, but also olives, vineyards, figs, and even almond trees.
As in the Cyclades, the terraces were cultivated (until the 1960s and 1970s), the restoration of each roller coaster was part of the annual routine of the farmer to which Pezula belonged. Unfortunately, as the years go by, with the removal of islanders from the primary sector and the abandonment of old crops (barley, wheat) on terraces, because they cannot be cultivated in a modern way (tramquil), the windscreen collapse. In Paros there are still pedestrians in the mountains, while the most beautiful are located in the area of white, along the Byzantine street (Lefkes-Protection) and on the road to Saints, where vineyards are still cultivated.