A paper on Aristeidis Metallinos

Aristeidis Metallinos, laic sculptor of Ano Korakiana (1908-1987)

Aristeidis Metallinos - Αριστείδης Μεταλληνός - is known to few. Villagers of Ano Korakiana older than 30 remember talking to him as children.  Aristeidis' son, Andrea, died in 2016. We attended his crowded funeral at Agios Athanasios, the cathedral of Ano Korakiana. We're honoured to be friends of Maria,  Andrea's sister, daughter of Aristeidis, also her son, Tassos; also of Angeliki, the sculptor's grand-daughter and her mother, Anna, Andrea's widow.
Aristeidis Metallinos was a craftsman of many skills, who became, in the last part of his long life, a sculptor - one of the island's talents. He died 20 years before we came to have a home in his village. Six years after our arrival, we were invited to visit the museum in which Andrea and Anna lived and in which the sculptor's work is currently displayed. Few others, Greeks or foreigners, have been inside.  It was once described as a 'museum', but last year that name was removed by workman in 2017, leaving Andrea's plaque on the front of the house, attesting it as his father's place of work.

To make his work known, a project in which we have faith, I submitted a Wikipedia entry in English and Greek. Two years ago, Angeliki, Lin and I, with Andrea's approval, made a draft catalogue of every work in the 'museum'.

With Andreas Metallinos' approval, Angeliki and Linda cataloguing his father's work 

Richard Pine was permitted to use one of the sculptor's marble friezes - The Saint of Preveza - in his book Greece Through Irish Eyes. In 2016 our son Richard made and administers a website owned and paid for by the family.
I have shown photos of many of the works to interested Corfiot artists and writers, Greek and British - Maria Strani-Potts, Jim Potts, Richard Pine, Katherine Wise. Also Corfiot historian John Petsalis author of Corfu Museum on-line, and his colleague photographer, Effie Stathia; the cultural anthropologist, Dr Alexandra Moschovi at the University of Sunderland. Irini Savanni, art historian and curator at the University of Athens, who I met in Ano Korakiana, her village. Aristeidis Metallinos is mentioned on Ano Korakiana's website and blog authored by Thanassis Spingos.
The first noting of the sculptor outside his village was by Giannis M. Maris - welcome, but brief, in a collection of artists' biographies published in 1978. The catalogue Angeliki, Linda and I made of the works in the museum in Ano Korakiana shows just 25 sculptures completed by that year.

Giannis M. Maris (1978) "Βιογραφικό - Αριστείδης Ζαχ. Μεταλληνός", in Απάνθισμα Γραμμάτων και Τεχνών, Athens, pp. 611–617

A much fuller paper of 23 pages illustrated with black and white photos of the artist's work was written by Professor Eurydice Antzoulatou-Retsila (she told me, in a letter, she preferred 'Eurydice' to the Greeklish 'Evridiki') published in Myriovivlos, vol. 7, Athens, pp. 37-47 - two years before the artist's death. 'Corfiot themes in the craft of the laic sculptor Aristeidi Metallinou'.

Ευρυδίκη Αντζουλάτου-Ρετσίλα (1985) “Θέματα Κερκυραϊκής λαoγραφίας στo έργo τoυ λαϊκoύ λιθoγλύπτη Αριστείδη Μεταλληνoύ” στο Μυριόβιβλoς, τεύχ. 7, Αθήνα, σελ. 37-47

Maria and Jim Potts have generously donated a 'free translation' of this paper's abstract:

The laic sculptor (sculptor of the people) Aristeidis Metallinos (1908-1987), from the Corfu village of Ano Korakiana, provides us with a common example of a folk artist or craftsman, for whom the need to earn a living pushes him/her in the direction of an occupation involving a variety of forms of traditional artisanal handicraft-work, until reaching the final stage of free and unconstrained expression of artistic inspiration through, e.g. sculpture in stone (in the case of Metallinos).
In the course of his difficult life, he practised as a wood-carver, a professional shoe-maker. He built fireplaces and ovens, carved and chiselled olive press mill-stones and hand grinding-mills.
At the advanced age of 67, he occupied himself as a sculptor carving in stone, declaring that he was self-taught. He thus realised a long-standing ambition to create and depict different forms of life which were slowly disappearing, as he had understood from his own experience of life.  His works of art demonstrate the true meaning of laic folk-art and provide visual testimony and evidence of aspects of Corfu’s culture and way of life, particularly in the north west of Corfu.
The inspiration for Metallinos’ sculptures was the folklore of the island. They are presented here for the first time. They were created in the period between 1975 and 1983. Two types are distinguishable: bas-relief sculptures, and statues, carved from white Kozani marble or Corfu stone.

They depict agricultural occupations* (milking a goat, a village woman carrying a load, the village olive press), traditional crafts and professions (the shoemaker/cobbler, the milkman, the village baker, the blacksmith), domestic activities (grinding with a hand-mill, a village woman kneading dough, a peasant woman carrying water), traditional handicrafts (a peasant woman with a distaff, another with a shepherd), villagers wearing traditional costumes (‘My mother’, an elderly man from Korakiana, a peasant woman in formal costume, a Corfiot).
NB If the word peasant’ is not felt appropriate now, substitute ‘villager’.

*I've recorded several of these. See 'Ano Korakiana in relief'

I am looking for ways of getting a translation of the whole paper – but without paying.

One of Metallinos' latest works - self-portrait of him at work 1984  (stone S 74 x 69 Cat 190) Photo: Richard Baddeley)

'...co-operation between the gardener and the cook...'

The top of Soho Hill, three miles north west of Birmingham city centre, is concealed by the terraced streets that run north-south across Handsworth to Soho Road, where the gentle topography of the old rural landscape is blurred, depicted in old pictures, difficult to match with present observation.

The topography of Handsworth. Plot 14 on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments is 420 feet above sea level

I didn’t notice the hill’s slow ascent from the Hockley flyover, two miles to Junction 2 M5 and Smethwick, until, 15 years ago, I took to cycling, sensing the artery’s steady north-westward incline in my pedaling. In places, green spaces remain, once pastures, or heathland, the area’s boulder clay unsuitable for cultivating crops.
Where buildings and streets stop, there lie, near us, precious green spaces, landscaped to oblige the town – St Mary’s Churchyard where the dead lie in their classes from family vaults to paupers' unmarked indentations, Handsworth Park, whose history I’ve written, and the Victoria Jubilee Allotments on the north side of Soho Hill, on a gentle slope that continues, beyond sturdy iron palings, to the Handsworth Park pond and St Mary’s Church, whose bells, hushed by trees, ring familiar changes.
In June 2010, when the new Victoria Jubilee allotments were at last opened, Lin and I chose a plot at the far end of a site for which I and others had campaigned over ten years helping the city to negotiate a S106 agreement that delivered eighty municipal allotments, gravel paths, drains and a portakabin club house. The allotment is 200 square metres. Plot 14. A new part of my life.
“I shall not join the site committee. I’ve done enough paper work and talking to win conditional rights to this ground. £30 annual rent for over 60s. I shall concentrate on cultivating my allotment!”
I began to break up the surface tufts of well rooted couch grass the day I signed the lease. So I started to learn just what we'd squeezed from a developer who’d planned to build over the whole site, but been allowed a third of what had once been private allotments.

Plot 14 June 2010 (photo: Linda Baddeley)

The ground the developer left, after all the grading and digging they’d done to build houses, was not what it had been. The precious old tilth, product of a century's gardening, had disappeared, skimmed and dispersed all over the site, the ground graded and compressed over several years of construction by heavy machinery. The area’s unforgiving boulder clay, pushed into the Midlands by ancient glaciers, never arable, had resurfaced. The developer, pressured by the city, and Handsworth Allotments Information Group (HAIG), had hastily strewn a miserly carpet of second rate topsoil, before handing over the site under the terms of their 2004 S106 Agreement with the Council.

In the first phase, Lin and I got a shed via freecycle. We levelled the plot’s slope, edging a square with tanalised timber on which, under a bed of sand and pummelled earth, we laid levelled slabs recovered from a Handsworth front-garden. I re-roofed the shed, adding a veranda.

January 2011. '...It makes a nice comforting sound when the rain is beating down it and one is dry and warm inside'

For the next three years of phase one, I learned about soil. There came a stage where I was close to giving up, not looking forward to the short journey - walking (12 minutes), cycling or driving - to our plot. The spur was a formal letter.

A wake-up call! I react well to notices like this

I also learned that, but for the darkest months, you cannot leave an allotment alone; that couch grass can only be reduced by persevering work that never ceases; that more or less all that's edible is food for slugs and snails, with different vegetables prone to the attention of specialist insects – onion fly, potato worms, carrot fly - as well as being prone to infestation by disease, and ailments arising from missing elements in the soil. Then there are the birds, pigeons especially, who focus on fruit. That another pest is people, who break into allotments to steal; that my plot needed investment in manure...

...topsoil and compost, delivered by tipping trucks and in builder's bags...

Black gold arrives

...that I could make my own compost, use mulch and weed suppressant fabric and netting; that I could grow from seed in a green house – bought second hand...

...and, with a fruit cage, grow strawberries and raspberries and more, and working with our neighbour Gill, an apiarist, and with site committee permission, have Buckfast bees on site, giving honey and pollination; that cultivable soil should be laid out in beds that can be reached from a network of paths to ensure not having to walk on them; that earth is rich, sensitive, structured - an environment for billions of micro-organisms; that when growing things you should be more inclined to feed the soil than the plants that you grow in it.

Published in 1945, no book on gardening has taught me so much

The second phase – from the start of 2015 - has to do with rejoicing. It would have been impossible without my discovery of, and friendship with Winnie Hall,  who’s growing skill and confidence have made Plot 14 work. ‘Our’ plot now yields crops – potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, runner beans, broad beans, onions, garlic, marrow, butternut squash, pumpkin, courgette, aubergine, peas, cucumber, apples, cherries, plums, strawberries, raspberries, pears, gooseberries, tayberries, artichoke, Jerusalem artichoke, parsnip, rhubarb, grapes, rosemary, chives.

Plot 14 on the VJA. The two flags are for my two most loved countries. They serve too as bird-scarers.

Some things planted have not thrived; cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts have more or less failed. But my feeling is of triumph made sweeter by seeing so many others who’ve fallen by the wayside as they’ve grasped the work, time and cost involved in growing food on the Victoria Jubilee’s testing ground. Almost shameless triumph is made joy by the visits of my grandson Oliver and now his sister Hannah, learning like me, ...

Winnie harvesting with Ollie and Hannah

...starting to grow things in the sunrise of their lives.

I’ve commissioned a painting from Jan Bowman to capture this delight – a portrait of Hannah, Oliver, Lin and I on the plot in July, celebrating our grand-daughter’s third birthday.

Winnie Hall, Jan Bowman, Oliver, Hannah and her mum, Amy on the rocking horse for Hannah's birthday

The third and present phase has to do with illusions; with something I’d not anticipated when focused on preparing the ground and getting it to yield harvests – a problem of bounty becoming glut.
Over a year ago I was talking to a friend, who has an allotment in London, about growing vegetables. Supper in a restaurant near Russell Square.
“…human beings’ relationship with the earth. How it’s broken. Severed over generations by the transition from rural to urban…estrangement from the land. Loss of craft in cultivation…How can I, whose ancestors abandoned the land with Industrial Revolution, getting rich as iron-masters, mill-owners, bourgeois progeny, urban aspirants earning wealth from the surpluses of mechanisation…Leas of Oldham whose business profited from the sweat of mill girls. Jacksons of Rochdale, a mansion home burned down by mill workers?”
I spoke of first generation immigrants, from lands where farming is still in the blood – as in Greece, in the Caribbean, Gujarat, Africa.
“How can I hope to acquire that feel for growing stuff?”
I glimpse a glaze, my friend, with all her grace, cannot quite withhold.
I struggle on “My paternal great grandmother, born in Oldham, married in London, left the city to live in a cottage by the Itchen. She cultivated, with help from Mr New, her gardener. My sister and I had the run of surrounding water meadows. My maternal grandmother abandoned a metropolitan social life to start the dairy farm where I was born…my stepfather, born in London, made a career in broadcasting…in his last thirty years making a successful TV programme called ‘Out of Town’ about disappearing country life, the fall-out from mechanized agriculture. He once called my grandmother’s adventure a ‘hobby farm’ … she was devastated…anyway…what I’m saying is, on my allotment, I’m getting back some of that long lost…”
My friend - at last – intervened; agreed that the relationship between humans and the land was "perhaps broken"
“Yes, yes” I said “accelerating distortions in relations between the city and the countryside…”
“But, Simon, what also matters, perhaps even more is the relationship between the grower and the cook.”

By email she referred me to a paragraph in The Vegetable Grower's Handbook (1948) by Arthur J. Simons:

Time and again I have seen kitchen gardens and allotments which have been assiduously sown and planted by the head of the family without any regard of the actual requirements of the kitchen...The golden rule is to grow what you most like to eat in sufficient quantities to ensure that you have enough of it but not on such a scale as to involve wastage. This demands close co-operation between the gardener and the cook or housewife.

“The real problem is whether you and Lin like cooking and eating what you’re growing on your plot”

'So proud' (photo: Winnie Hall)

Leaving aside the author's archaism about 'head of the family', I hadn’t thought of this. I had just assumed that cooking and eating would follow the successful harvesting of which I was so proud.

Linda asks "So what am I supposed to do with this lot?"

So... now I..we have to learn  and far more important, agree, about succession planting, about storing, about deep freezing, about preservation, about bottling, making jam, jelly, chutney, about dehydrating, - every craft and trick from the ancient books about how to even out harvests; cooking and eating what's grown at home. There's the satisfying option too, of giving stuff to neighbours, and on occasion bringing a basket of surplus from the plot to offer for collection, when we do street work with Handsworth Helping Hands.

Denise and her niece Winnie preparing harvests from Plot 14 for freezing

Bees

The previous owners of this house cut down three trees in its small garden to make room for a dish that would enable them to view the same programmes they watched in England. They took it when they left. One of the amputated trees recovered. Lefteris thinks it's an orange. We don’t know. It’s not blossomed since it was cut a few centimetres from the ground. Now its leaves reach over two metres and it bears, for the first time we’ve been here, a few blossoms. 

Five clusters of flowers, hidden amid spiky leaved branches. 

At last! Blossom on the recovered tree? Is it orange or lemon?

Will the tree bear fruit again? Right next to our wooden balcony is a fine orange tree, blood orange – one that fruits bi-annually. It's fulsome with blossom.

“Every two years. How do you know that?”

“Last year no blossom. This year, as two years ago, a proliferation” 

“Perhaps that’s because the blossom wasn’t pollinated”

“There was no blossom to be pollinated”

“How do you know?” repeats Lin

“I remember” 
Many bees have been visiting the tree. Their industrious mumble starts at first light. Continues into late afternoon.

"We just need those bees to spread some pollen on the recovered tree"

"But is it lemon or orange?"

I wade in ignorance, but dip a paint brush into the flowers of the fecund orange tree's blossom and with its pollen yellow from the stamens dab the pistils of the few blossoms on the smaller tree.

"Try the lemon tree too?"

I repeat the process - collecting the precious dust from one of our richly blossoming lemon tree stamens, so that the flowers on the recovered tree may be doubly fertilised.

Pollen from the fecund orange tree's blossom - the yellow at the tip of the brush

"So if this works; if the pistil I've dabbed with pollen..will it turn into fruit?"

"Should do"

A few days later I'm hanging out laundry to dry and hear a buzzing round the little tree and see bees searching. Then as I stare, one, and then, two bees are all over two of the blossoms, searching, probing, touching stamen and pistil with their bodies. 
I've been reading John Crompton's 1947 book The Hive about keeping bees - not, in the first place, for their honey. 

Crompton, though not anthropocentric, is the more readable for unashamedly attributing wisdom to bees, interpreting their actions as if they thought and planned like humans. The odd thing is that despite his admission that his interest in beekeeping began with wanting to ensure the fertility of his fruit trees, he does not at any point in his book describe how pollination actually occurs and what follows its success...The Orange blossom has a stamen (anther and filament), pistil (stigma, style,and ovary), sepals, ovules, and petals...
I do hope Gill has managed to obtain a new swarm to re-populate the hive on Plot 14. 

Building a surround for Gill's empty hive on Plot 14

*** ***
We watch the series Game of Thrones  – first two seasons, and want to know what happens next.
"We're on series 4" says a friend
Earlier we'd watched Breaking Bad – sometimes three episodes a night. Then for a break from that story-telling, a look at a Catherine Cookson yarn on DVD, her recognisable characters and familiar turns – the evil landowner, a self-made working class man, a fractured childhood love consummated at last. If it’s not film then I’ve my head in a book, perhaps two at a time. I embrace narrative.
"But you know these great stories, these assemblages of creative talent entertaining audiences across there world; their sucking my brain, leaching out imagination. Instead of inventing things out of words and thoughts on a page, all - music, sound effects, words, faces, places - are created for me to enjoy. Passively. These brilliant sagas use ingenious technologies to colonise what in a book I would be imagining."
"Oh yeah? Then why do you find it so exciting to see those bees cuddling the blossom recovered from the sat-dish placed over them?"
Scripts and above all coherent plots with beginnings and middles and ends, encompassed within a time-scale that fits my sense of the dramatic, stimulates me to excitement and fascination at ‘what’s going to happen now'. The Great War is anticipated; in minutes it’s upon our characters and then - wreaking havoc - it’s past, and the plot is picking up pieces on its route to a happy ending.
"Let's have coffee?"
“Isn’t it almost ironic” I said to Lin, after an especially gripping episode of Breaking Bad, “that we had to exercise will power not to go on to the next, even though it’s so late…yet here we’re living in a country in a crisis such as we’ve not seen in our lifetime. We struggle to grasp it’s drama. We’re like the crew of a vessel far out in the deep ocean that rides a tsunami unnoticed – except through our instruments -  because the wave that will wreak such harm on reaching land, raises us an imperceptible foot and it's a hundred miles wide.

A cold grey day in the village. Lin and I wait for a bus to town to see our accountant

Whatever's happening here is often easily ignored, though on the bus a Greek friend broke off a five way conversation between fellow passengers, one that was started by the young driver as he collected our fares for Ano Korakiana at the Green Bus Station in the town.
"We are discussing 'the situation'" she said
Our impression is of people weary; exhausted, most of the time showing a brave, even cheerful face. But one of the passengers, a neighbour, has a problem with her heart. the clinic here says she needs an operation in Athens.
"It's financially impossible for her. There's supposed to be money set aside for the poorest, but it's not getting to them"

Panos Kokkinias’s Yiorgis

A young man in traditional Greek garb – white pleated skirt, embroidered vest and red pompoms on the tip of his shoes – is floating, his arms outstretched, in the still, turquoise sea. It’s unclear whether he’s dead or just resting from earlier battles with the open water. This photograph, more than any other piece shown in the new exhibition No Country for Young Men in Brussels’ Bozar complex, captures the question that many are asking about Greece today: What is going on with Europe’s first bailout victim?...

*** *** ***
It seems as if we never let up on jobs to prepare the house for the family arriving in a matter of days - painting, joinery, stone laying, filling and drilling...

Take apart a well-used palette, removing nails, sanding smooth, varnishing. Prepare the space between wall and carpet in the room where Oliver will sleep - no longer in a cot. Glue and screw the boards to the wall; top them with a trim; itself sanded to fit the top of each board, and then fill any spaces left between skirting and wall.
"He's got a lovely view from his window"
"Sure he can't climb out?"
Grandparents, as we did for our children, scan every inch that way

No job seems too small.
"Can you recognise the leg on this plastic table that has been replaced" I asked Sally when she came to lunch yesterday.

"Four new legs, Simon!"
"Right"
Lin's been preparing the dining room as a temporary bedroom - a space for our friends and their baby.

"They need to be able open the stable door top without worry about mosquitoes and flies. I need to make a screen"

Getting that to fit the top of the curve exactly was tricky.

Getting DIY supplies from the ironmonger at Tzavros

Our shutters and several window frames are wooden. Their paintwork lifts under the Greek sun. Parts need sanding, undercoating and repainting.

Linda makes a neater step for the veranda door from pieces of recovered marble, bringing me pieces to trim with the angle grinder...

As Easter approaches young Lefteri and his father, Foti, paint asvesti - lime-wash - on the edges of steps to out two houses. That's being done all over the village; all over Greece.
"It's good if the rain holds for three hours!" says Foti
Which it does. The wet grey mix turns dazzling white in a sun burst through the chilly overcast.

Lin's applying her mix of blue paint to furniture - bedside drawers, chair, shelves, cupboard - for Oliver's room.

...and of course that unattractive of old men's attributes - nose hairs - must be plucked.

*** *** ***
Yesterday evening at Saint Athanasios at the bottom of the village...

Το Ευχέλαιο της Μεγάλης Τετάρτης

Γράφει ο/η Κβκ

17.04.14

Τη Μεγάλη Τετάρτη το απόγευμα, η Εξομολόγηση και στη συνέχεια το Ευχέλαιο, έφεραν αρκετό κόσμο στον Άη-Θανάση. Ο χώρος στην πίσω πλευρά του ναού (πίσω από τα στασίδια) είχε πλήρως ανακαινιστεί από τους Επιτρόπους και εκεί ο ιερέας δέχτηκε τους προς εξομολόγηση πιστούς. Στη συνέχεια τελέστηκε η Ακολουθία του Ευχελαίου, στο τέλος της οποίας οι πιστοί δέχτηκαν από τον ιερέα τη σταυροειδή χρίση με το αγιασμένο έλαιο, προς θεραπεία του εσωτερικού κόσμου και ακολούθως προμηθεύτηκαν για το σπίτι αγιασμένο έλαιο από την αναμμένη κανδήλα που είχε τοποθετηθεί σε τραπεζάκι μπροστά από το Ιερό. Και ενώ ο πολύς κόσμος είχε αποχωρήσει, ξεκίνησε όπως προβλεπόταν η Ακολουθία του Όρθρου της Μεγάλης Πέμπτης, πιο γνωστή ως τελετή του Νιπτήρος. Έξω, βαδίζοντας προς το σούρουπο, η πτώση της θερμοκρασίας είχει ήδη αρχίσει να γίνεται αισθητή...