Arts Crafts Architecture Design Retreat Lesvos Greece

Andreas Sell is the founder and operator of the Hermitage Sykaminea. The last two summer programs gave rise to the Lesvos Wool and Hermitage Sykaminea Gathering initiatives. Together with Julie Loi, Sell started the wool project in 2020 and organised the Hermitage Sykaminea Gathering in 2022 with EJ William, Eirini Tiniakou and Walter Götsch.

The Hermitage is in the north of Lesvos on one of the slopes of Mount Lepetimnos, with view over the sea till Turkey. It is located in an olive grove, two kilometers away from the village Sykaminea.

Lesvos is one of the easternmost North-East Aegean Islands and lies very close to the Turkish coast. This volcanic island rises nearly 1000 meters above sea level at some points. Mountains dominate the island. Almost half of the island are hills with olive and fruit trees. Forests, mostly with Mediterranean pines, oaks and walnut trees, cover about 20% of the surface.

In the east of the island there is a long tradition in growing olives. Along the hills there are terraces forming the base for olive groves in which you find many sheep. Olives and sheep are what farmers cultivate in the region since thousand of years.

Creative Countryside e. V. is a non-profit association that supports the Hermitage Sykaminea. The association promotes German-Greek cultural exchange and ecological projects on the island of Lesvos with a focus on sheep's wool processing. The board of the association is Orkun Akdag and Ines Schönauer. The Hermitage Sykaminnea offers, for a limited period of five months in 2026, stays for artists and individuals engaged in artistic practice. The stay is intended as a self-organised use of the place as a retreat for individual projects. It is explicitly not a supervised, curated, or institutionally supported residency programme, but rather a temporary transitional use of the property. Use of the property is entirely self-directed. No organisational, curatorial, or artistic services are provided on site.

Creative Countryside e.V. was founded in 2022 and has so far been financed by the association members' own funds. From 2023, the association will acquire additional funding to finance stays of international project groups at the Hermitage Sykaminea. The association uses donations to pay for travel, material and subsistence costs for the project groups, as well as publications resulting from the stays, and thus promotes cultural exchange.

Please contact us if you would like to support the work of Creative Countryside e. V. with a donation. You will receive a donation receipt on request.

Thank you very much for your support!

2026

January - March: Winter break

May / June: Tomas Eyzaguirre and group

June / July: Tanja Mosblech; Workshop “Heaven and Earth”; 22–27 June; book your participation: tanjamosblech@icloud.com

July / September: Reagan Truax and group

October: OLIVE HARVEST

November - December: Manufacturing of felt rugs and pads

The Hermitage Sykaminnea offers, for a limited period of five months in 2026, stays for artists and individuals engaged in artistic practice. The stay is intended as a self-organised use of the place as a retreat for individual projects. It is explicitly not a supervised, curated, or institutionally supported residency programme, but rather a temporary transitional use of the property. Use of the property is entirely self-directed. No organisational, curatorial, or artistic services are provided on site.

Available Residency Periods

15 May – 14 June (already booked)

15 June – 14 July (already booked)

15 July – 14 August

15 August – 14 September

15 September – 14 October

For inquiries, please write to: info@hermitage-sykaminea.org

There are 8 bed sleeping places. In addition, other guests can camp in the olive grove.

Accommodation

- two double bedrooms, each with a double bed mattress

- one room with two single beds

- one house with two single beds and kitchen

- one bathroom

- a pergola with kitchen and communal lounge

In summer 2020 and 2021, the Hermitage initiated summer programs. Almost 30 artists, architects, musicians, designers, curators and photographers spent time at the Hermitage to work together and alone on projects of their own choosing. Workshops, concerts, discussions, excursions, film screenings, craft and artistic work took place. New collaborations and projects have emerged from the summer programs.

Summer Program 2020

Summer Program 2021

Hermitage Sykaminea Gathering 2022

Autumn Residency 2023

SLEEPING UNITS

HERMITAGE SYKAMINEA

Design: Andreas Sell

Construction drawing: Jens Kühnel

Building permit: Estela Stavrinou

Construction coordination: Jens Kühnel

Seven years after the first timber house, the second one was built in the Hermitage. The design and construction of the building is based on the first house. Here, too, the roof pitch is adapted to the slope and the wooden façade is aligned horizontally. One difference to the first building is that this one stands on pillars that rise two metres above the ground. This created an open space below the wooden construction that provides shade in summer. The use is also different. The house is purely a sleeping house, consisting of three small bedrooms. Together with the pergola, which consists of a kitchen, a living room and two bathrooms, the building forms one unit.

INSTAGRAM

VIEW ON MAP

2027 GENERAL ACCEPTANCE – Applications Open

Gathering point for crafts,

architecture, design and arts

The Hermitage Sykaminea is situated in an olive grove on the slope of Mount Lepetymnos on the island of Lesvos, GREECE. It is a quiet, non-curated artist retreat in Greece for self-organised groups. Hermitage Sykaminea offers long-term retreat space on Lesvos. It was founded in 2016 as place for retreat. Between 2020-22 IT has been restructured. It became a gathering point for crafts, architecture, design and arts. Over the winter months utilitarian objects from wood, wool and ceramics are manufactured.

PERGOLA

HERMITAGE SYKAMINEA

Design: Andreas Sell

Construction drawing: Olivier Maarschalk

Building permit: Estela Stavrinou

Realisation: Andreas Sell, construction team Dimitris Grigoriou

Helpers: Thodoris Dimitropoulos, Marco Pinarelli, Casey Ramar

The basis for the first sketches for the pergola was a conversation with the architect Dimitris Theodoropoulos. He described a feeling he sometimes has when walking through space:

„I am thinking of the human and the body as a convergence of lines-borders leaving areas, sovereignities and identities to either sides of the lines. So this very special „knot“ of converging borders makes each individual a place where different forces pass through.“

Applied to the construction of a space, the posts and connections of the pergola could be the lines and knots that Theodoropoulos speaks of in an abstract way.

The first sketches for the pergola result from this conversation and involve Sell´s own experience of straightness and curvature. There is no 90 degree angle in the wooden construction and the wall, floor and roof surfaces do not form a straight line but are curved.

In the course of the design process, the drawings changed a lot. On the one hand, the local conditions, the legal regulations and the feasibility were decisive for this. In collaboration with the designer for wooden structures Olivier Maarschalk, the construction drawings for the supporting structure of the pergola were converted.

After the engineer Estela Stavrinou had obtained permission from the building authority to build the pergola, the construction team Dimitris Grigoriou poured the ground slab and with the help of Thodoris Dimitropoulos, Marco Pinarelli and Casey Ramar the wooden structure was built.

MAP

SLEEPING UNITS

HERMITAGE SYKAMINEA

Design: Andreas Sell

Construction drawing: Jens Kühnel

Building permit: Estela Stavrinou

Construction coordination: Jens Kühnel

The Hermitage Sykaminea is situated in a terraced olive grove. The steep slope creates a large difference in height between the terraces. To avoid having to climb up and down walls, different staircases between the terraces were designed and built.

Wolfram Sinapius designed a staircase made of stone, wood and metal wire, which is easy to build and for which the stones available in the olive grove can be used. Wolfram's staircase became the most built staircase in the Hermitage.

In the Hermitage Sykaminea, utilitarian objects are produced. So far these are wooden chairs, ceramic lamps, felt trivets and wooden blankets and cushions. The special thing about these objects is that they were largely created in collaboration and there was no prior design, but the form was determined during the making.

Likewise, olives are harvested every year at the Hermitage Sykaminea and oil is made from them.

BOOKING

In the future, a grey water reed bed system will be installed for the waste water from the kitchen in the pergola. The basic principle for the Hermitage is that only completely degradable cleaning products are used. The reed beds on the terraces below the pergola will then be used to further purify the water. The construction of the systems is planned for next year. Helpers are very welcome!

Chairs, benches and high desks made from simple wooden slats and boards.

The origin of furniture making in the Hermitage was to make use of wood scraps. This is how the first objects were made. Later on, more attention was paid to the comfort and furnitures were developed that were comfortable in their simplest construction. The already used material, which finds its new purpose in the furniture, and the simple construction gives the appliance a rough, almost brutal character and in this way creates its own style.

Ceramics is another material used in the Hermitage. So far we have specialised in lamps and decorative objects.

The design is characterised by the handicraft process. The ceramics are not designed in advance, but their shape is created during the production process.

In the production of ceramics, cracks are provoked, either in the modelling stage or during firing. A broken piece is either glued during the working process, so that a visible crack remains, or the shards give rise to a new form. The broken ceramics challenge to think anew in the working process and in this way to create a new and unplanned form. The crack that remains in the ceramic refers to this and at the same time to the transience of the object.

ACTIVITIES

There are about 60 olive trees in the Hermitage Sykaminea. A rather small olive grove, where the olive harvest takes place every year between November and January. According to the year, there is more or less oil, which will be available from end of this year.

Two years ago we started working with wool at the Hermitage. Since then, we have tried out a lot with the material and also thought about what the manufacturing of wool products could look like on the scale of a small business. Last autumn we launched our first collection of handmade felt trivets which is available for purchase.

The trivets shown vary in size between 30cm (l) x 30cm (w) and 60cm (l) x 40cm (w).

It is the aim to revalue wool by buying raw wool from farmers in the area of Sykaminea and making objects from it. In this way we plan to bring traditional processing methods into a contemporary environment.

Lamp Shade (Ceramic)

33cm (l) x 24cm (w) x 31cm (h), fine red clay, transparent varnish

Wall Lamp (Ceramic - Wood)

35cm (l) x 17cm (w) x 50cm (h), fine white clay, white engobe, wood slats

This first prototype is modelled in fine white clay and inlaid with white engobe. The wooden part of the lamp is made of slats and deliberately simple. The two light boxes of the luminaire are reminiscent of buildings with colored light shining out of their windows. lt overlaps on the white surfaces, creating color gradients.

Table Floor Lamp (Ceramic)

31cm (l) x 24cm (w) x 33cm (h), fine red clay, granite brown glaze

Table Floor Lamp (Ceramic - Wood), comes together with a wooden stand

27cm (l) x 21cm (w) x 53cm (h), fine red clay, granite brown glaze

Lamp with candle / warm object

45cm (l) x 22cm (w) x 30cm (h), fine gray clay, transparent, glossy glaze

This object is from the series "In the forest". It reproduces an organic shape and surface, reminiscent of a root or a strange animal. The candle inside the object warms the clay so that the whole object is warm.