In communion with stone, The rural architecture of Lesvos

The value of a work lies in the expression of the creator’s struggle over the matter endeavouring to accomplish an intention, a plan: a struggle with matter of an exclusive utterance and performance sheltering its own “demons”. Thales declared that all matter is alive with gods and demons.

The handiwork of a folk artisan confined within narrow financial limits is an expression of such struggle with the available materials and space as well as with the physical landscape which can accept only that amount of forms. Lack of technical means combined with learning safely guided the artisan to implement forms of human proportions and made him converse with the “demons” of the materials and of the landscape, rather than harness and humiliate them. According to the definition given by Euripides, this latter act would constitute an abuse (“it is an abuse to want to rule demons”). Thus, the artisan’s doing looks like “a natural blossom of stone”, as Pericles Giannopoulos once described the work of an ancient artisan.

Accumulated learning inspires the folk craftsman guiding his choices and planning. Such learning involves his era and his spiritual riches, an amassment of knowledge from all preceding eras in its specific field.

M Zagorissiou-G.Giannoulellis