Home Murals of Molyvos

The murals which are visible in the Giannakos House are much less extensive than those in the Krallis mansion, but still tantalizing; a painted view of Constantinople and its environs set amid banded decoration and decorated wooden ceilings which seem to writhe with foliate designs and are edged, as in the Komninakis-Krallis Mansion, with idyllic scenes of palaces, ships, and towns. The Komninakis-Krallis Mansion preserves an even more extensive decorative cycle. In a riot of saturated color and intricate pattern it displays townscapes of Constantinople, Smyrna, and Molyvos, an image of a building which may be the mansion itself, seascapes crowded with vessels, panels painted to imitate marble revetments, images of houses and fountains and arcaded porticoes, scrollwork, garlands and vases of flowers, fruit darkening in its ripeness, bright-feathered birds, confronting animals, nereids, seraphim, musicians and dancing maidens, courting couples dressed both in traditional Ottoman clothing and in the occidental fashions of the time, and figures which might be angels or erotes depending upon interpretation. Though demonstrably a part of a wider Ottoman era tradition of painted interiors (a tradition which continued to be demonstrated on Lesvos into the twentieth century through the work of Theophilos Chatzimichail (as seen in the reconstructed room of the Zolkou house in the Museum of Modern Greek Culture in Athens), the Giannakos House and the Komninakis-Krallis Mansion resonated with me in other ways.

Given my upbringing as a New Yorker, the aforementioned images are suggestive of the painted mantles and walls which graced the houses of the eighteenth and nineteenth century descendants of the Dutch settlers of Nieuw Nederland up and down the Hudson Valley, and likewise of the decorative motifs of the Pennsylvania Dutch of Lancaster County, as well as other traditions of early-American folk art. Yet perhaps even more than this, in my Byzantinist’s mind, the murals raised questions regarding the decoration of medieval Roman houses, and medieval Roman secular art more generally. In the first place, not only the house itself, but the buildings and gardens depicted in the paintings themselves, recall a famous ekphrastic passage from the twelfth-century epic Digenis Akritas, in which the eponymous hero builds himself a palace on the banks of the upper Euphrates.