Shells, Bottles, Spools, and Other Treasures

Collector since childhood

I no longer remember how old I was when I created my first collection. I must have been in first grade. Every summer, we rented a small house on the beach at Marathonas. A pebble path led straight from the garden to the sea, and along the shore stood other little houses just like ours, ending at a large hotel which is still there today. Children back then followed a rhythm even during the holidays: a morning swim, then back home for lunch, and afterward came that dreadful midday quiet — the hour when boredom felt endless, when minutes were counted one by one, and you were forced to color silly illustrated books as if life depended on it. And then, at five, the invisible barrier lifted. You ran back to the sea, and with you, like the gates of a tiny prison opening, all the other children burst out too, and the games began for a glorious couple of hours.

I think it was those hours between three and five that gave birth to the collector in me. To collect means to gather with — to speak with someone, with something. To cancel loneliness. To find a companion always willing to listen..

It was during those quiet midday hours that I decided to collect seashells. At first, I picked up whatever lay on the sand. Later, I got a mask — a thick blue one with a little white ping-pong-like ball on the snorkel — and I began diving for those glossy treasures. Sometimes I reached them on the first try; other times, I had to attempt again and again. My father began calling me his little dolphin, watching my stubborn dives, always pushing myself a little deeper, a little farther, to seize that one rare shell.

One day — for reasons I can no longer recall, perhaps an early-morning quarrel between my parents — I went down to the beach very early and discovered something magical. Right where the waves meet the shore, tiny double shells would appear, each with a little creature inside, moving as if walking on the sand. What beauty they held — what shine, what colors. Red and yellow and green double shells that snapped shut the moment you tried to pick them up. You never saw them after eight in the morning; they vanished, I don’t know where. This became my secret. At dawn I would slip out quietly, cross the pebble path, open the iron gate as silently as I could, and enter that little paradise. Later, I would return home, open the shells with a small knife, empty their slippery contents, and sort them — a ritual that banished the dullness of long summer afternoons. I found beautiful boxes and arranged my treasures with care. Some of them survive even now, and when we meet again when I sometimes open old boxes , fifty years later, we "speak" again — and so many stories rise to the surface.

I raised my children loving  shells. I taught them to lean gently over the sand, to "read"  the sea and the weather — the south wind brings treasures and the north wind steals them away. We competed to see who would find the rarest one: that tiny transparent red shell, or a “little eye of saint Lucia” — not the faded kind, but the one that shines with vivid colors — or those miniature green spirals. And as the summers passed, even now, as adults, they’ll still call me with voices full of pride to say, “You won’t believe it — I found a pecten jacobeus!”

It was this first collection that led to what followed. The bottle collection began when I went to England as a university student — apothecary bottles, utilitarian vessels from another era, inkwells, tiny glass miniatures. Glass always made me feel safe. It hides nothing; everything is visible. I often wondered what it would be like if our hearts were made of glass — if our feelings were transparent too.

Then came the wooden spools, the tin boxes, the buttons, the old keys.

Perhaps even before the seashells, I learned what life inside collections looks like when I used to walk through Monastiraki (the flea market in Athens) every Sunday with my father, watching him search for… something. Just something. Those were our hours — the two of us together. The hours when I saw him hold a small bundle wrapped in newspaper and tied with string — something that made him happy — and we would walk home feeling light, almost skipping. A little girl with her elderly father. Or maybe it was the stamps — their bright colors, their delicate pages that had to be turned so carefully, without touching the tiny perforations, just admiring them without laying a finger on them.

And so, piece by piece, a life of collecting formed. A life of noticing. A life of rescuing what is small, quiet, overlooked — and giving it a place, a story, a voice. A collector is never truly alone. A collector lives a life full of anticipation, curiosity, adventure. A collector is always ready to travel to the very edge of the world… just to find something.