‘Splashes of whitewash on the rock’ of Tinos
Amateur photographer sets out on a mission to document his native island’s churches and chapels
A tall, gaunt man strides along the weather-worn stones of a Tinian footpath holding a camera, the most important piece of ammunition for his mission: to capture his island’s soul, its churches and chapels. Manthos Prelorentzos, a 47-year-old Athenian with family roots here, spent four years wandering Tinos’ vast and almost forgotten network of medieval footpaths to accomplish, in 2020, the formidable task of photographing every one of the island’s 924 dovecotes. His work was presented in an attractive self-published book of 328 pages, building on the work of Swiss architect Manuel Baud-Bovy, who spent two months on Tinos in 1955, giving us drawings of some 800 of these distinctive structures.
Now Prelorentzos has turned his attention to the churches and chapels, of which there are many more. Two of the island’s most important folklorists, Georgios Dorizas and Alekos Florakis, estimated their number at 1,100 and 1,300 respectively, back in the 1970s. Prelorentzos has now picked up the baton, carrying on their work in the present day. He’s not working with a cheap analog camera and film that can only take 36 frames, as his predecessors were. He’s got the technology to shoot hundreds of high-definition images and to keep track of each location via satellite. Nevertheless, it is an ambitious undertaking that now, as then, requires a love for exploration, nature and tradition.
Speaking to the experienced mountain climber, guide and tae kwon do instructor, it is evident that this “incredible mission” is a labor of love.
“Walking the same paths for the second time on my quest to locate all the chapels, I am noticing all sorts of things I missed when looking for the dovecotes: a threshing floor here, a spring there. These are all part of a fading tradition that I feel obligated to record and salvage,” he says.
Indeed, with an aggressive wave of overtourism sweeping across the island, these chapels, these 1,300 “splashes of whitewash on the rock,” as Florakis so poetically described them, seem like the last guardians of a way of life that is all but extinct. For Dorizas, Tinos’ churches and chapels not only tell a story, they are also a reflection of the elements that shaped the soul of the vernacular artisans who worked on them.
These simple, no-frills chapel may not evince the awe you feel when looking at a grand church, but they do make you feel the “awe of humility,” says Prelorentzos, describing the transition from the stark, windswept Tinian landscape to the heavenly peace of a humble chapel like a passage into a different dimension.
The divine also meets the human during the panigyri, when the owners of these chapels (they are all privately owned) open their doors to celebrate the saint they’re dedicated to. Apart from pilgrimage sites, however, they also “form a strong bond between the residents,” Prelorentzos adds, pointing to another close relationship that is found on Tinos, between the island’s Orthodox Greek and Catholic communities.
“At Panagia Spiliotissa Church, beneath a rock overhang and beside a stream that runs under the church, there is a Catholic and an Orthodox altar in the same space,” he says, adding that there are also two chapels of the two faiths in the area of Vourna. “They’re back to back with a narrow passage dividing them, as though they’re arguing. But one faces West and the other East,” he says.
Apart from the chapels, a phantasmagoria of sky and sea also stars in Prelorentzos’ striking photographs. Some show mountaintops or a stretch of cloud hanging over the strait between Tinos and Syros; others show the clouds forming Biblical scenes over the small bell towers. “There is no better time to visit the island’s chapels than at Easter,” says Prelorentzos.
“During the winter and spring, Tinos has this incredibly dramatic light and impressive meteorological phenomena, which appear to be tamed by these humble white chapels,” he says.
