About Us
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Byzantine Art, which reached its zenith some twelve hundred years ago, is alive and well in a small fishing-village near the southwestern tip of mainland Greece. Here, in a sunny seaside workshop, Yorgos Samouris works his craft with silver and gold and semi-precious stones to re-create original designs from the past. A jack of all trades before settling on jewelry-making, Samouris "discovered" the bejeweled spiritual artifacts of his ancestors in a local monastery where the ancient traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church were kept alive despite several centuries of Ottoman conquest. But it was not all coincidental; the core of his occupation was providential and a birthright.
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Born in Megara —the ancient capital city that to this day presides over the region— Samouris' relationship to Byzantium spans the millennia to the pre-origins of the Eastern Roman Empire. It was in the seventh century B.C. that King Byzas of Megara founded a city on the western shore of the Bosphorus, naming it Byzantium after himself, providing a location for Roman Emperor Constantine to move his Empire to the east a thousand years afterwards, in the fourth century A.D.. |
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Constantine enlarged on Byzas' creation, renamed the city Constantinople (after his own self) and made it the capital of a vast empire that lasted more than a millennium as the only civilized part of Europe during the continent's Dark Ages. The name Byzantium persisted during the entire tenure of the Eastern Romans —who themselves were called Byzantines— in a land whose common language was Greek and whose all-powerful religion, a major branch of Christianity, was known as Greek Orthodoxy. |
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It was this religiosity which became the crux of the particular arts and crafts that are now the life-focus of Yorgos Samouris. In Byzantium there were no arts outside of the spiritual which of necessity encompassed the depths of human expression and survived intact to this day despite all other artistic movements and historical "accidents" like the Muslim occupation of all Hellenistic lands for many centuries. |
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Samouris inherited this rich tradition in the most meaningful way possible: these days he is the only practitioner of authentically Byzantine Fine-Art with clients that include all the highest-profile ecclesiastical institutions of the Orthodox Church, from the Patriarchate down, as well as famous personages like Fidel Castro, the late shipping-magnate Yannis Latsis and his family, Barbara Bush, England's Prince Charles, Constantine, the former King of Greece and many others. But it wasn't always so. Samouris was born into an affluent family that ended up in dire straits due to an earthquake in 1981 when the scion himself was fifteen years old. He managed to finish college in microbiology, a profession he never pursued, preferring instead to work odd jobs, including bartender. Soon enough it was time to serve his compulsory stint in the military, and upon discharge to get married and immediately, despite economic hardships, to have children. In need of income to meet his obligations to his young family and possessor of an aptitude for handiwork, he embarked on a career as a self-taught jeweler, imitating designs of professionals whom he admired. He showed his work in an Athenian exhibition, gaining enough recognition to be encouraged. He pursued his ambitions for three years, showing five times in Athens and selling enough of his handicrafts to stay afloat financially. |
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The big turning point in his life came about in Saint Paraskevi, a monastery of the Megara area. On a plateau atop a cliff that juts up from the shore, the monastery is set against swaying cypresses, vineyards, orchards and fields of wild flowers. This is a consecrated location where the saint's sanctuary has been since the beginning of the Christian era. It has been rebuilt and extended in the last eighty years after repeated visitations by the saint to local penitents ordaining that her place of worship reflect her importance in the Greek Orthodox canon. |
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The monastery, aside from the pilgrimage it elicits once a year on the saint's name-day, is a place of serious work. Many monks inhabit it, tending their fields as well as the never-ending construction, and many faithful spend time there to retreat from the daily grind, to contemplate, and to devote time to their art. Among these devotees were the then-youthful, aspiring jeweler Yorgos, and the middle-aged, master-artist Vasilis Fotopoulos. |
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This elder, a theatre and cinema set-designer/art-director/costumier, double Oscar-winner (for Zorba, The Greek and for America, America) and world-famous expressionist-painter, used the monastery as a refuge from a society he regarded as doomed and no longer reconcilable either with nature or with God. The monastery's peaceful environment was where he created much of his work, while nourishing his passion for the spirituality of Byzantine art. He contributed greatly to the cost of building the monastery on his own architectural plans, and while there he re-imagined the "look" of ancient Byzantine artifacts and liturgical objects. His designs were spectacular, but he needed a practitioner to bring them to life, to hammer and sculpt metal around stones and holy images, to produce works of timeless art. The monks introduced the neophyte Yorgos to Vassili, and the rest is history. Fotopoulos assigned Samouris a trial-by-fire: the restoration and re-interpretation of a time-eroded brass cross from the sixth century. |
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The artifact needed to be reborn according to the elder's own design, and although it proved to be the most difficult assignment of his entire life, the acolyte succeeded brilliantly because he had to. The motivation was to enter a field inhabited by very few and which could offer not only a good living but also endless fascination, especially to someone as religious as Yorgos. |
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Fotopoulos was so impressed by the young man's budding talents that he became his mentor and main employer, hiring him to execute complicated designs for all manner of religious items from icons and emblems, to chalices, bible covers and sarcophagi. There followed connections of the highest order, right up to the Ecumenical Patriarch, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church in his Seat in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople and even more formerly Byzantium), to Kings and Princes and American First Ladies and shipping magnates, the gamut of individuals and institutions who can afford Byzantine art. |
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In the intervening years, Yorgos' children, one daughter and two sons, have grown. His 22year-old daughter Eleni, is in college with aspirations to join her father in future, but the sons, 20 year-old Vasilis and 18 year-old Christos —in trade-colleges studying silversmithing— are already following their father's footsteps, having joined him in the workshop as apprentices. Yorgos now teaches his sons the secrets of the trade, and the three of them together are turning Byzantine Fine-Art into a family business. |
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The works of art that Samouris makes for his major clients are by their nature precious. Crafted exclusively by hand from silver and gold and encrusted with semi-precious stones, these are beyond collectors' items, they are museum pieces. He has, to date, only dealt within the Orthodox church in and near Greece and with particular individuals. He now plans to project to a wider public, to Orthodox institutions worldwide, international galleries, museums and aficionados with private collections. He will make to-order exact reproductions of his most famous and best articulated pieces as well as original, one-of-a-kind pieces to suit particular needs of new clients. All of these artifacts are based on paradigmatic designs which themselves are based entirely on traditional Byzantine art. |
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Available directly through this website by personal contact. |
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Byzantine art is back in the spotlight after five centuries of relative obscurity as the esoteric domain of the church and of academe. It is now accessible to all cognoscenti collectors, ready to delight and to inform with its beauty and its spirituality. Please take a look at the products page for samples from the long catalogue. You will be enchanted.
Text by Byron Ayanoglu |