Our story
About Konxa
Eleftheria's story
I grew up in a place people save all year to visit. Every summer I watch them come and go, seeing maybe a tenth of what surrounds them. They might miss the night swim in the sea when the organisms glow. They miss the Independance Day in March, when the whole village marches and celebrates. These moments for us are the most valuable, and therefore with κόνξα we invite people to what we mean when we say Halkidiki.
Κόνξα is a small experience studio in Halkidiki. We host tastings, workshops, and slow days outdoors. Everything is run with local producers as partners, and locals are as welcome as visitors.
I am Eleftheria, and I welcome you to Konxa. Together with my team and partners, we create activities, workshops, and nature tours. But this all did not start overnight.
This project has been circling my dreams for over three years. It began with my bachelor's thesis, a study of Halkidiki's coastal ecosystem. I interviewed the people who manage our beaches and found something strange: we shape the coast around what we think visitors want. For example, to make the shoreline "sanitised" and "pristine", we remove seaweed and natural debris. Yet, my data said that visitors valued the natural beach more. With the difference that this wasn't being offered to them.
That gap never left. I went on to study environmental communication, because people are, in the end, both the origin of the environmental issues and the solution to them. I trained on how humans and wildlife coexist and spend many years abroad. But I kept coming back. I come back to the pine forests on the middle peninsula Sithonia, to the wetlands full of birds that most Halkidiki-ans have never visited, to the people who have spent their lives making olive oil, wine, coffee, beer. People who are extraordinary at what they do and have no way to reach the people who would genuinely value it.
Konxa is my attempt to close that distance.
Although I frame Konxa as an ecotourism agency in papers, In truth, I'd rather call it a cooperative. The experiences here are built together with the people who lead them. Each person has their role. For example, the roaster explains the bean, the biologist reads the landscape, the designer makes it all reachable. Everyone brings the thing they do best.
The people behind Konxa matter to me. Not only they are crucial to the functioning and running of this project, but they also make working a fun and creative space. You heard my story, not it's time to listen to theirs. And especially one's: Vasiliki's.
Thank you for being here, at the beginning of a different way to do tourism in Halkidiki.
Welcome. - Eleftheria
Konxa — what is it
We didn't design the logo. Geography did.
The shape of Halkidiki's three peninsulas is a turtle — a chelona. That's the whole idea behind our name and our mark: a place that already drew its own emblem, long before we arrived to notice it.
Who we work with
A network, not a directory
We work with olive farmers, winemakers, scientists, beekeepers, and people who don't have a job title for what they do.
Most of them are older. They've spent their lives perfecting something — a wine, an oil, a coffee ritual. They don't have Instagram. They don't need it. They have you, for one afternoon, if you show up.
Nature interpretation
We're not guides. We're interpreters.
A guide points at things. We find the thread between what you already care about and what this place has to give. The olive tree you'll taste has a story that goes back further than the taverna you had dinner at last night. The bird you'll hear before you see it has been stopping here for ten thousand years. We're just going to help you notice.
