At the edge of Loggos beach, beside the old primary school, stands the largest industrial building on Paxos: the Anemogiannis factory, with its chimney of twenty-four metres.
The Anemogiannis family bought the plot in 1874 and the brothers Stefanos and Ioannis began with an olive press. After Stefanos died in 1910 his son Spyros enlarged it into a works that refined oil, pressed olive kernels and made soap; in the 1930s it even bottled cognac. It ran on steam between 1918 and 1930, took new machinery in 1938, and at its height employed between sixty and seventy workers. Its oil was shipped as far as Turkey, and in the war years the factory stored and guarded the producers’ oil and helped the island through.
An account from 1926 describes it as the best equipped plant on Paxos: hydraulic presses, a three-roller Italian mill fed automatically from the floor above, a filtering room, an electric generator. Fires in 1964 and 1966 did serious damage, and the works closed in the 1980s.
The building is listed, and stands in an area designated for its natural beauty. It is now owned by a private company and is being converted into a hotel; the structure and its historic appearance must be preserved, and the chimney is part of the works. Older guidebooks describe it as an occasional summer gallery, which it no longer is.
Getting there: at the north-west edge of Loggos, on the shore.
