Maria Krina

Born in Patras, Maria Krina studied education in Chania, Crete. After several years as a teacher, she followed her passion for cooking. She opened a restaurant in her hometown and ran it as chef and kitchen manager for 13 years. She taught herself: she read more than 80 books and brought forgotten recipes and ingredients back to life. Today she is a specialist in traditional Greek cuisine, its philosophy and its history. She has championed organic and holistic cooking since 1998.

Maria has lived and worked on Syros since 2013. In 2014 she founded Cooking Tales – hands-on Greek cuisine, where she uses her background in education to teach cooking for health and wellbeing. She has taught more than 500 people in her classes and workshops so far. She designed and led the hands-on workshops of the Erasmus+ project Healthnic Diet for Inclusion, run with the Vardakeios School of Ermoupolis and named one of Europe’s four best Erasmus+ projects of 2019. Since 2017 she has been a vetted host on Traveling Spoon, a worldwide culinary tourism platform.

With Travel in Art, Maria leads cooking workshops built around Syros’s wild native herbs. Her classes are about the land, memory and respect for nature, and they nourish the soul as well as the body.