Kilims, rugs, blankets, woven fabrics, lace and other stories

The journey to Skyros was long, back in the ’70s. We had to cross Evia island on narrow roads to reach Kymi and then catch the boat to the island. Very few visited the island, especially in winter. We traveled together with our neighboors Venus and Theodore , because he was an architect freshly arrived from Paris and was building a house on the island for a French woman. All of us squeezed into my father’s car. A cassette with Greek songs—always the same one, on repeat. It was a great adventure that ended at Kyra Kali’s house, an incredible, colorful universe. A stone house with traditional wooden structures inside: downstairs the living room with Skyrian carved wooden furniture, the fireplace, stone-built couches that doubled as beds; at the back a small kitchen, and next to it a wooden staircase—well, not really a staircase, just three or four steps—that led up to the sfas. The sfas was essentially a wooden loft overlooking the living room, with an intricately carved wooden divider separating the rooms. The floor was covered with colorful loom-woven kilims; the walls decorated with plates, jugs, copperware; the bedding was handwoven or woolen—scratchy and not to my liking at all—and the blankets were heavy but beautiful, full of colors and patterns. In this tucked-away, wooden, colorful, low-ceilinged world lies, I suppose, the starting point of my love for all kinds of handmade embroidery—everything falls under “embroidery” for me. I know there are many categories, but that’s what I call them: embroidery. I remember Kyra Kali taking me down to the basement where the loom was, and I would stare at the woolen balls of yarn in bright colors. What a world!

This is the world that wells up inside me whenever I see blankets, crib bumpers, woven cloths, kilims… I imagine the women weaving alone with their thoughts, counting, handling the weft, tracing and copying the pattern—birds, hares and kings, peacocks and little figures with woolen caps. I picture them in pairs spinning wool, laughing at half-whispered secret jokes about the boys who made their cheeks blush; washing the wool in copper pots, dyeing it with walnut husks, eating a rusk or an olive. These are the women I see before me—from Thrace down to Crete, from Naxos to Mytilene, Lefkada and Skopelos—spinning, embroidering, weaving in cold and in warmth, creating blankets, cloths, bridal linens, ensuring the family had what it needed, and sometimes so that she might hold a special place as a golden-handed craftswoman, a housewife known by name. In every piece of embroidery, I think I’m searching for that name lost in oblivion; I’m looking to give a name, to remember an Argyro, an Eleni—or better yet, Vangelis’ Lenio, whose fingers were slender like stems and who worked cutwork embroidery like no one else. Her linen curtains still flutter in the breeze, together with Maritsa’s towels, hanging at the sides of the washstand beneath the mirror that greets you with a “good morning.”

Sounds rise up, and scents, and laughter, and tears, and nights lit by the lamp.

It’s not that the past seems romantic—because it wasn’t. It was hard, cold, hungry, and heavy. But it had a human breath to it, something I miss so deeply in our times. And so—how else can I say it?—if we are all to vanish into the universe as though we never existed, then by gathering all these fragments I want to proclaim that I saw you, daughters; I heard you; I danced with you at your weddings; I stole a sip of tsipouro with you; and I lay down on your beddings, which are as beautiful as you yourselves once were.