They’re something of an “open secret” in Greece, and have long been the product most closely associated with the island of Aegina, but the famous pistachios from the Athens-adjacent isle had their international kudos boosted last week by an online travel site.
TasteAtlas judged Aegina’s pistachios to be the best of a list of “top 10” nut varieties, slightly ahead of the bright green Antep pistachio of southeastern Turkey.
While not a “hidden gem”, as the tired cliché goes, Aegina is a year-round magnet for urban dwellers in the greater Athens-Piraeus area, where roughly half of Greece’s population lives. It is also a standard destination for one-day cruises embarking from the main port of Piraeus for the islands in the Saronic Gulf.
The port of Aegina, in fact, fields a large outdoor vendors’ markets stocked with its homegrown pistachios.
Widely known since early antiquity, beach-girt Aegina is home to the remnants of the temple and sanctuary of Aphaia, a mythical goddess worshipped almost exclusively on the island.
Another two Greek entries made it onto the site’s “best nuts” list: the pistachios of the Megara area and the shelled pistachios of Fthiotida, the prefecture in south-central Greece.
