Mount Othrys
— — the mountain the old gods kept.
Not only on a wall.
“The range that runs west to east across the southern edge of Thessaly, between the Spercheios valley and the Pagasetic Gulf. In the old stories Othrys was the seat of the Titans, the mountain on the losing side of the war with Olympus. The summit, Gerakovouni, rises a little over 1,700 metres. Shepherds still take the high pastures in summer. — from the studio
Mount Othrys, 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.
Mount Othrys is a range in central Greece, straddling the boundary between Phthiotis and Magnesia. The summit, Gerakovouni, reaches roughly 1,726 metres, well below the great peaks of Pindus but high enough to hold snow into spring. The range divides the Spercheios basin to the south from the Thessalian plain to the north, and its lower slopes drain east toward the Pagasetic Gulf at Volos. Footpaths from villages such as Anavra and Smokovo climb through fir forest toward the upper meadows, used as summer pasture by local flocks.
Above the tree line the range opens into a long ridge of grassland and broken limestone, cooled by the meltemi winds that move down from the Aegean in summer. On a clear day visibility reaches the Sporades to the east and Mount Olympus, about a hundred kilometres to the north. The air carries thyme, oregano, and the resin of Greek fir from the lower forest. Cloud often catches the ridge by afternoon and slides south toward the Spercheios, gone again by the time evening settles on the villages below.
The range is built largely of Mesozoic limestone and ophiolite, the latter a green-grey rock pushed up from oceanic crust and now exposed across the southern flank. Geologists treat Othrys as a type-locality for the Tethyan ophiolite belt that runs through the Balkans into Anatolia. The stone outcrops as low scarps along the ridge, weathered into karst hollows where small flocks shelter from the sun. The monastery of Panagia Antinitsa, on the southern slope above Lamia, is built from the same pale limestone its hill stands on.