Old tomato factory turned into cultural venue

The Santorini Arts Factory at Vlychada Beach is inaugurated tomorrow evening, Saturday July 12th, 2014. With a rich program and covering almost all arts, the Santorini Arts Factory organizes events that will last until the end of September, attracting many locals and tourists. The aim of this new effort is to combine tourism and education with arts like theatre, dancing, music, painting, sculpture and photography.

Among others, the events that will take place all through the next two months until late September include:
- a personal photo exhibition by J. Joshua Garrick entitled Imprinting the ancient kallos
- a personal sculpture exhibition by Stelios Panagiotopoulos entitled The fairy ship
- mini festival of young artists
- the theatre performance Romeo and Juliet for two that will take place on a ship
- many concerts of Greek musicians
- a tribute to equality and family violence.

This new cultural venue in Santorini is housed in a renovated cherry tomato factory that was in fact among the first factories for the production and packing of tomato juice on the island. This industrial building was constructed in 1945 by the Nomikos local family and quickly developed and started exports. Due to the development of tourism in Santorini, the cherry tomato production was dramatically reduced on the island and the factory finally closed down in 1981.

With its recent renovation, the tomato factory of Vlychada was turned into a cultural venue and an industrial museum, exhibiting the traditional methods of tomato production in Santorini, elaboration machinery from 1890, old tools, old manuscripts of the factory, the first product labels, and more.