The Carpenter's Chair
On a small carved chair from Skyros, and what a craft made slowly, by hand, for a single room, can teach about living.
There is a chair in a workshop in Chora that takes a week to make. It is small, low to the ground, the seat woven from rush, the legs and back cut with patterns that have been passed down for longer than anyone can say. It will outlive the person who buys it.
We have grown used to objects that arrive overnight and are forgotten by spring. The Skyrian chair is the opposite kind of thing. It was made small because the rooms were small, made beautiful because there was no reason for it not to be, and made by hand because that was the only way there was.
The patience in it
Watch a carver work and you understand the island a little better. The chisel moves slowly, the same motion thousands of times, and a shape emerges that was always there in the pine. There is no hurry in it because hurry would ruin it. The wood, the local Apello pine, has its own ideas, and the carver listens.
It is the same patience you feel everywhere on Skyros, if you let yourself slow down enough to notice. The long meal. The afternoon given to a single cove. The chair that takes a week.
What it holds
Buy one and you don’t just take home a chair. You take home a week of someone’s attention, a pattern older than the country, and a small argument against the idea that faster is always better. Set it by a window at home and it keeps insisting, quietly, that some things are worth doing slowly.
If the craft draws you in, the full story is in our guide to Skyrian wood-carving, and the best place to see the old pieces is the Faltaits Museum.
More from the Journal soon. To plan a slow few days among the workshops of Chora, start here.