Kalymnos sponge-diver harbor
— a harbor that remembers what the sea cost.
Not only on a wall.
Kalymnos sponge-diver harbor, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Pothia, the main harbor of Kalymnos. The houses come down the slope in pale blues and ochres to a working waterfront where the sponge boats still tie up. The trade made the island and broke it: a century of divers in the skafandro suit, decompression sickness, men who came home crippled or did not come home. The town keeps the memory plainly, in the museums and at the breakwater.
The place, in three passes.
Kalymnos is one of the larger islands of the Dodecanese, in the southeastern Aegean, immediately north of Kos and west of the Turkish coast. Its main town and harbor is Pothia, built into an amphitheatre of slopes around a deep natural inlet on the south coast. The island holds a population near 16,000, most of it in and around Pothia. For more than a century Kalymnos was the leading sponge-diving centre of the eastern Mediterranean, and the working harbor is still the heart of the town.
The diving fleet leaves each spring after Easter, traditionally on the day of the Iprogos, with the boats blessed at the harbor and the town turning out to see them off. Until the late twentieth century the boats stayed out for months at a time, working as far as the North African coast. The annual Sponge Festival in Pothia is held the week after Easter and remains one of the most distinctive folk events in the Dodecanese.
The cost of the trade is carried plainly on the island. The introduction of the skafandro hard-helmet suit in the 1860s allowed depths and durations the body cannot tolerate, and decompression sickness disabled or killed a large share of the Kalymniot diving population over the following century. The Maritime and Folklore museums in Pothia hold the suits, the breathing pumps, and the names. The harbor goes about its evening and the memory sits with it.
