Artisans of the Molyvos Connection Project

Over the past two days the students participating in the Molyvos Connections Project, on the Island of Lesvos, visited two artisans/artists, who have marked the island with their craft. Dimitris Kouvdis (a ceramist) and Dora Giannakou Parisi (a decorated doll maker) are local treasures on whom we will be posting more.

Here Dimitris steps in his workshop's storage space, inspecting the materials for the upcoming July firing of his kiln. We visited Dimitris in Agios Stefanos, close to Mandamados, on the Northeastern coast of Lesvos.

In this very location we met Armand Leroi, professor at Imperial College, London, who has been studying Dimitris' craft, but also the pottery of Lesvos for the past few years. Armand shared with us knowledge and insights from his years at Agios Stefanos.

In this picture, Dora presents to us a family heirloom (a peculiar icon of St. Michael with notable confessional implications from early in the 20th c.). We found Dora in her stunning home, the so-called Giannakos Mansion, a late 18th c. Ottoman Turkish home in Molyvos, in which her family moved after the population exchange of 1922.