Thucydides Papageorgiou was a school-master his entire working life, but he has the hands of a labourer. It was these hands that were busy restoring the carved wooden ceiling of his 19th-century village house in Kapesovo, northwestern Greece, when they brushed against an unexpected streak of orange beneath the plastered surface of the wall. He scraped away the white lime to reveal the hind leg and whip-like tail of an animal. Before long he had uncovered four fantastical beasts, naive in style, blotchy and brightly coloured, with intense, swirling, black-and-white eyes. Eager to find more, he used the same technique on the walls of his bedroom. There, again, a surprise lay beneath the white surface: everything was painted, not just the walls, but the fireplace and window shutters too. The white room that he had known all his life – the very room in which he was born – was revealed to be a circus of colour.
Kapesovo is one of the 46 villages of Zagori, a mountainous region of Greece that abuts the Albanian border, part of the North Pindus national park. The villages, nestled in deep green forest, cling to mountainsides or gorges, while their houses, all uniformly of grey limestone, cluster around the plane tree marking the village square. The palpable sense of remoteness here makes it even more surprising to find such striking examples of skilled folk craftsmanship on the walls of these houses, harking back to an era of wealth and prosperity. Few know about them and even fewer care for them.
The story behind Zagori’s unlikely flourishing begins in 1431, when the villages made a treaty with their Ottoman conquerors to avoid taxation, instead sending a few young men every year to the sultan’s cavalry. Over the centuries, Zagorisians both benefited from their economic privilege and made the most of their connections to Istanbul. Spurred on by the lack of opportunity and resources at home, enterprising villagers quickly established businesses throughout the Balkans, principally in the Ottoman province of Wallachia (in modern-day Romania). In true Greek tradition, they became merchants, trading goods down the Danube, all the while developing a network of land routes that extended back to Zagori. They never forgot their villages (where their women and children had remained) and sent back money both for public benefit and to beautify their homes. Their heyday was from the late 18th to the early 20th century.
Sumptuous murals were one of the ways in which this merchant class showed off its new wealth. The finest paintings are typically sequestered away in an oda, or side room, on the upper floor of the house, which was reserved for the eyes of only the most distinguished guests. These reception rooms, furnished with grand fireplaces, are (or were) covered from floor to ceiling with panels of paintings: some of them with geometric designs, others with vases of gorgeous flowers, others still with stylised figurative landscapes. We see rolling hills and grand houses set among orchards, as well as boats or even trains, in allusion to their mercantile life. The homeowners commissioned whatever took their fancy, incorporating modern scientific concepts (such as diagrams of the heliocentric universe) into their designs and revolutionary figures such as Napoleon. These were highly educated people of taste, with distinguished connections in western Europe – and they flaunted it on their walls.
The artists, almost without exception, came from one village: Chioniades, just outside Zagori. Like the merchants, they were motivated by the natural inhospitality of their mountainous homeland to find work elsewhere: instead, they became itinerant craftsmen. The tradition was passed down through the generations, and families of painters spent the summer months travelling from village to village decorating houses and churches. The richness of the pigments they used reflected the wealth of their patrons. They painted on dry plaster using egg tempera, or occasionally practised fresco technique and, in the late 19th century, experimented with oil.
Not all the surviving paintings are fortunate enough to have Thucydides’s hands to look after them. Some villagers, indifferent to their charm, have simply whitewashed over them. In any case, restoration is difficult and costly. Alexandra Varzoka, whose grand house in Kapesovo has belonged to her family since its construction in 1790, showed me a huge iron girder that is single-handedly propping up a wall, damaged by an earthquake several years ago. Behind it lies one of the finest painted odas in all Zagori. Warped by damp, wonky from subsidence, the paintings are just about clinging to the wall, in places held on only by patches of flimsy gauze. Several cousins own the house, and they all need to agree, not to mention gather the funds, for its restoration. Can the state help? I ask, and she chuckles wryly, lamenting the lack of any government-led plan. But without substantial investment, these extraordinary paintings are going to crumble, and a whole world with them.
A version of this article appears in the October 2023 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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