Helen Wyatt — The Boat Trip to Vathy, and Beyond…

I just haven’t seen roiling blue on soupy blue on misty blue much from my New South W bubble. These blues meld and seep and I felt emotions compress my chest - emotions that were simply a physical response to intense beauty …or is there an Eleni buried within me? Maybe George is right.

 Out of this blue, dolphins push up from just under the surface and take the classic leap up and back down - tempting us to keep watching us. Seduction.

 The mountains touch the water and rise dramatically. Barren forms suggest I should make them live in metal but it’s about scale and grandeur and that sudden edge. On top of those mountains rises St Elias - in a place where no one recognises an oar and where the ravens feed … and there are crumbling structures that belong to a Byzantium long gone. 

Fresco at Panagia Hosti (Vathy). (Photo Nadia, 2025)

 One chapel felt like a reduced Scrovegni chapel in Padua waiting for Giotto to come along and ‘fix’ the forms with a bit of foreshortening. The figures painted for Panagia Hosti (an all encompassing strong Mary) and her assumption to the heavens almost disappear. They are soft and sinewy and they look at each or just to the side not like those at the entrance staring with  big eyes in soft instruction. I don’t feel a sense of the patriarch here. Are they more the early Christian lambs of god? Are they a community of saints? Who knows?

 The Hellenistic Greeks were here - weren’t they everywhere? .. That Alexander! At some of the  ruins there is evidence of shattered and repurposed marble columns and tombs. The debris remains crushed into mortar. Mosaic floors survive from those Byzantines and their god.