the pop-up studio
The working space of the ‘velanidi’ residency is established in a pre-industrial home-scale winery of Peleta, built-in 1903. This pop-up studio we have set up on the ground floor of the building offers a spacious place for work and a small but rapidly expanding library of children’s books as well as a corpus of local history books, archival material, and references.
A systematic restoration project is going on—although at a slow pace. The restoration project aims at exploring, researching, and documenting the history as well as the stories of the building, its residents and the surrounding community of Peleta. Our goal is to turn this old winery into a proper studio and a library that will host artists and creatives, accommodate their needs, and provide a space where ideas and dreams will come true.
While the restoration project is underway, resident artists will be hosted in houses provided by the locals of the community of Peleta and will be able to work and show their work in the pop-up studio at the winery premises.
the village
It is said that the village of Peleta took its name from the old Turkish word for oak nuts, ‘pelit’. Giant, centuries-old oak trees still stand scattered around the village, bearing witness to all they have seen and heard.
Peleta of Southern Kynouria is a mountainous village on the southeastern side of Mount Parnon. It is located on a plateau and it is surrounded by smaller settlements and villages.
Most of the residents moved to Peleta from the surrounding mountain villages at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. What brought people to the plateau of Peleta were the opportunities provided by viticulture and the fertile lands of the area. At the same time, the demand for wine-producing vines in Greece, especially in the Peloponnese, peaked since the phylloxera epidemic that appeared in France in 1863 destroyed about two-thirds of European vineyards.
The entire village lifestyle revolved around grape cultivation and wine production. Most of the two-story stone houses feature built wine basins on the ground floor and cellars on the basement level. These spaces served as small-scale pre-industrial winemaking facilities, many of which are still intact today.
