The first time Dimosthenis Kokkinidis saw the Cyclades was in 1958. The island architecture always reminded him of the house he grew up in Drapetsona. He himself remembers: "I first saw Sifnos, in '58, the island of the potters. I did not imagine then - a lover of pottery myself - that in the next five or six years I would be helping the locals with worthy foreign craftsmen within the framework of EOMEX, and that in addition my wife Pepi Svoronu and I would spend our summers in Vathi until 1966 of Sifnos with their wonderful folk architecture".