by Nick Sweeney
Some years back we bought our five-Euro kitchen ikon from a roadside shop somewhere near party town Faliraki on the Greek island of Rhodes. Too early, in theory, for the diehard revellers to have got up yet, and also too early for them to recommence revelling, it was a perfect place for us older holidaymakers to stop the car. Keeping an eye open all the same for random hungover quadbikers, we strolled in search of a coffee, dodging the few severely hungover people actually out of bed and upright, and then took a look at the shops.
I’m not religious in any sense of the word, but like churches and religious art. Greek orthodoxy supplies both in an irresistible package. The ikon shop was therefore an immediate draw, in an open-sided tent, bright to keep the midday sun out, and cool inside.
We browsed the rows of ikons, and noted that they depicted the usual subjects, saints mainly, of course. Some were instantly recognisable: Saint Nicholas, with short white hair and kind eyes, and John the Baptist, sporting dreadlocks and a thousand-yard stare revealing his fraught itinerant existence and urgent mission. The others we had to read in our laboriously learned Greek script, trying to reconcile it with the stylised squiggles used in Byzantine painting. A restorer I once got talking to reminded me that often the artists of old were illiterate, and copied the writing from older ikons or scribbled instructions, which is why spellings differ quite so much sometimes.
In the background sat a girl in a bright red sweater at a messy table of her own, strewn with paints, pots, turps bottles, brushes, rags and wood both in neat rectangles and rough cuts. Despite the shade of the roadside canvas, it wasn’t really cold enough for a sweater. I always think primary colours give adults a child-like vibe. She looked to be any age from 12 to 20.
Strangely, she looked more or less exactly like one of the teenage children I used to look after back in the 1980s when I worked in a playgroup with disabled children and adults, a girl called Litsa from a London Greek family. Litsa had some non-specified learning disability that barely showed, and as far as I knew she never needed any actual looking after, and often helped out with the more severely disabled children at busy times. She would sometimes get rather agitated and complain that people thought her name was the more prosaic Lisa – a fair complaint, we had to agree, though easily done. She never seemed quite convinced by this, and would go into a bit of a mood for a while. I say strangely because the London Litsa I knew in 1989 would also have been any age from 12 to 20. Twenty years on, this could logically not be her. And yet this young woman had the same hunched appearance, the same slight build, the same dark blond hair parted awkwardly on one side, and the same anxious pale eyes and slightly protruding teeth. Being on Rhodes, there was the obvious Greek connection. If it was indeed London Litsa from the eighties, she had been miraculously recreated – along, come to think of it, with the red sweater Litsa used to wear. It may simply have been one of those eerie instances of lookalike strangers.
Whoever she was, she was painting – or, at least, I saw at once, seeming to paint. It was odd, because it was clear even to our inexpert eyes that the ikons on sale were fixed onto their blocks of wood not by paint but by a different process. They are pre-printed onto wafer-thin sticky-backed paper, or perhaps a kind of plastic, and are pressed carefully onto prematurely-aged or deep-dyed plywood half an inch thick, imitating the traditional material and colours found in ikons – usually a palette of darker shades, except for the gold of haloes or the occasional muted yellow and red details in saintly robes. Of course, fixing a flimsy sheet of plastic accurately onto a wood block is a particular talent needing precision, a keen eye and at least one steady hand, though perhaps not to the degree needed by an ikon painter; the result of such a skill is easily worth five Euros.
As we browsed and hummed and hahed, the girl persisted with the masquerade, under my occasional gaze. Once I realised what was going on, I stared hard at her work. She had a wooden block in front of her, as an ikon painter would. She had a half-finished ikon on it. She had paints arrayed, and a thin brush in her hand. As I watched, she painted part of a delicate line of gold onto the block. She looked up a little slyly, to see if I was still watching. I was. I made a sort of you-have-to-be-kidding face, and stopped short of a signal that she could stop now – we got it. She grinned to herself; did she think I was fooled? Well, maybe, but I’m pretty sure she knew I was aware of what she was doing. She also knew, I guess, that I wasn’t about to come over and accuse her of… of what? I mean, it was undeniable that she was actually painting an ikon, after a fashion, or at least part of one, if only a centimetre of gold paint.
Getting the pre-printed image onto the block must go wrong every now and then – maladjusted, wrinkled, torn. When that happened maybe they just made it look like a work-in-progress, and let her loose on it whenever anybody seemed to be watching. Then of course it would actually be a work-in-progress, or, at least, have the appearance of one. It was all paradox – a splendid idea from Greek thought and philosophy – but, steady on, a bit too early in the day for paradoxes-within-paradoxes.
Do roadside ikon sellers really believe that their customers fall for this? I suppose so – we are all dumb tourists at some point, and they’re aiming at those of us who are indeed gullible enough. And we all, at some point, like to think we have bagged a bargain. In Rhodes at the time, you could buy three beers for five Euros, so nobody who knew the approximate value of more or less anything would seriously expect to get a hand-painted ikon for that price. I guess some do; how do they suspend their disbelief quite that far? If I could meet them, I’d sell them London Bridge at a knockdown price.
A bonus: the real beauty of it is that it genuinely does no harm. For that paltry five Euros, we got a lovely dark ikon of Aghia Marina. She is the saint who banished a major demon – Beelzebub – and in our ikon there she is with a hammer in her hand, with a little demon nearby about to be bashed over the head with it. That sounds a bit slapstick and cartoonish, but it’s not – the sacred duty of daemon-dispatching may be as serious as deeds depicted in ikons get. In the background is one of my favourite structures ever, a little Byzantine church, its domed roof tiled. And all for five Euros.
And I also got the story of the fake ikon painter of Faliraki, so – I’m including it in the five Euros – it was a bargain all round. I sometimes wonder what she said if people ever asked her what her holiday job was, and whether she said, “I’m a pretend ikon painter.” I think I could be happy doing that job myself.