Chios
— the island the mastic trees still answer to.
Not only on a wall.
“A long Aegean island just off the coast of Asia Minor. The south of the island is given to the mastic villages, the only place in the world where the mastic tree weeps its resin in commercial quantity. The village of Pyrgi carries dark geometric xysta cut into its facades. Inland, Nea Moni keeps its eleventh-century mosaics under a low dome.
Chios, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Chios is the fifth-largest of the Greek islands, lying in the eastern Aegean about seven kilometres off the Turkish coast across the Chios Strait. The island covers 842 square kilometres and has a population of around 50,000, with the main town, Chios Town, on the central east coast. The interior rises to Pelinaio at 1,297 metres in the north, while the south is gentler and given over to the twenty-four mastic villages of the Mastichochoria. Homer is traditionally held to have been born here in the eighth century BC.
Pyrgi, the largest of the mastic villages, is known for xysta, geometric black-and-white patterns scratched through a layer of white lime to reveal dark volcanic sand underneath. The technique is medieval and survives almost nowhere else in Greece. Fifteen kilometres west of Chios Town, Nea Moni is an eleventh-century Byzantine monastery built under the emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, with mosaics from around 1050 set across the squinches of an octagonal naos. It was added to UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1990, together with Daphni and Hosios Loukas.
The mastic tree, Pistacia lentiscus var. Chia, only produces commercial resin on the south of Chios. From mid-July through September each year, growers score the bark and gather the tears as they harden on swept ground beneath the trees. The harvest is regulated by the Chios Mastiha Growers Association, founded in 1938 and uniting more than four thousand families. Mastiha was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014. The clear, slightly piney resin flavours liqueur, chewing gum and Greek desserts.