(The Island of Tinos, in the Aegean Sea, 1535 CE)

On the CycladicIsland the ancients called 'Ophiousa'-"the place of the snakes," there was a long tradition of exceptional Greek marble cutters and sculptors. This trade on Tinos was alive as far back as the classical age, and due to its rich quarries, the island produced for over a millennium some of the finest cut and polished stones in the archaic world. This handsome craftwork was used both for sculpted artwork and for sacred architecture.

The rare and uncharacteristic green marble, the color of vibrant plant life, had been in great demand chiefly during the Renaissance for its ornamental nature. It was shipped out of the Mediterranean over the latter centuries to embellish some the most somber and elegant places in the world-many far flung from the island of Tinos, over land and sea to immeasurable distances. Even to this day, stone craftsmen and artists can be found active there, creating out of one of the hardest substances on earth edifices which, for one reason or another, had always been intended to last for an eternity.

Inside the remote village known as Pyrgos, the cutting, sculpting and polishing of this specific green marble has continued against a stunningly quiet backdrop of dry, rugged mountains and clear, blue skies. On the hills above the village, discovered and unearthed in the 19th century, were several circular Mycenaean tombs in the 'tholos', beehive style. The materials of their construction was a more common variety of gray marble, not the rare, green 'Tinian' type, which was located centuries later in the northwest corner of the island.

This Tinian-green stone was discovered and exploited for its grandeur at a time when the Venetians occupied the region, in the 15th century CE. These gray-stone tombs, however, were extant from the Mycenaean Period (1600 - 1250 BCE), when warrior kings ruled vast areas of mainland Greece, and occasionally a few island kingdoms. This older epoch in Greek history and literature, sometimes referred to as the 'Age of Heroes,' was the time of the great historical figures around which Homer composed his epics, "The Iliad" and "Odyssey." These legendary rulers haled from their own separate city states, and as myth and history have it, a number of them were enlisted to fight in the great Trojan War. The battle field for this conflict was across the Aegean Sea, outside the gates of legendary Troy. Their the Greek armies struggled to bring back to Greece the legendary Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the known world, and stolen by the Trojan prince, Paris.

According to these literary triumphs, composed in ancient Greek perhaps in the 8th century BCE, King Menelaus from Sparta appealed to his comrade kings on behalf of his captured wife Helen, to bring her back and restore his honor. As the legend is told, the warrior-kings from each kingdom all abided to come to his aid, dutifully and with great sacrifice.

These included Nestor, from the mountainous region of Pilos; Agamemnon from his Mycenaean kingdom in the Peloponnesus; and Odysseus from the island kingdom of Ithaca, in the Ionian Sea. All of these kings of their own domains joined into the venture honorably, but with great sacrifice, the literature was to tell. They were also accompanied by the heroes Achilles and Heracles, summoned respectfully to the call of battle. It was a sacred request of allegiance among these 'Achaeans,' a name the Trojans and nomadic tribes of the East called the crafty Greeks.

Several of these Achaean warlords over time were eventually buried in such royal Mycenaean tombs, befitting their stature in history, and by the customs of the era. The most famous of these circular tombs is found and marveled at today on the windy plains of the Argolis of the Peloponnesus mainland. It is there where, like the site of Troy itself, the nineteenth century archeologists discovered and excavated the Mycenaean citadel, once thought to only exist in myth.

The great tomb of Agamemnon, once wise king of the fortress is there in Mycenae, and next to it a tomb thought to be that if his wife, Clytemnestra. Both marble structures were discovered beneath huge mounds of earth, the size of small hills outside Mycenae's fortified walls by the German archaeologist in 1874. With its dramatic, Egyptian-style entryway and colossal stone-on-stone, circular structure, this tholos has remained as one of the most phenomenal subterranean funerary buildings in the world. Schliemann, like British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who in 1900 excavated the legendary palace of King Minos (of Minotaur and labyrinth fame), accepted that much of the ancient myths which come down to us today and were once shrouded in the mists of the past are often based in real history.

Like the excavation and identification of the many levels of the city of Troy in northwestern Turkey (unearthed four years earlier than Mycenae), the complex worlds of myth and history continued to overlap in human record and imagination. The Mycenaean tholos design, with its unique parabolic, curvilinear construction, became a signature of the ancient Greek world for high praise and reverence. The precise stone cutting and fitting of marble in the this tomb style was the exacting standard which would be admired in later eras of Greek architectural genius such as the great open air, circular theaters.

Eventually that pinnacle of engineering and design became unequalled in the Greek temples to the culture's deities, particularly the great Parthenon to Athena on the Acropolis of Athens. But it would take a thousand years of darkness before the recognition of such Classical Age achievements would be brought into the light once again by the spirit and age known as the Renaissance..

As the merchant class in Europe grew around the Mediterranean during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a New World which had been discovered outside it continued to be explored, the green Tinian marble became even more sought after for its decorative and rich, ambient affects-the green hue which reflected the warm tones of nature. Taken from quarries in the remote northeastern area of Tinos, known as 'Damari tou Kleanthi,' the stone soon came under high demand by the Christian Church, the Renaissance Italian princes, and the royal houses of France and England. Much of the interior marble wall-facings of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, as well as BuckinghamPalace in London, and the Louvre in Paris had been garnished with this verdant Tinian variety of marble. No one, it seemed of power and importance could get enough of its exquisite deep green luster and serpentine striations.

During the great Age of Exploration to the New World in the late Renaissance of Europe, the Ottoman Turks, along with various other perennial pirate fleets, continued to menace the Cycladic islands in the Mediterranean Sea, attacking sporadically and plundering villages. Constantly challenged by them were the Greek and later Venetian settlements on Tinos, vital and independent at the time in farming and fishing. From 1207 through 1715 CE the rule of this island had been decidedly Italian as the Venetians resisted the brutal occupation which had befallen most of the other islands and settlements of the Greek mainland during 450 years of Ottoman Empire domination.

Subsequently, Tinos, through its defenses against pirates and diplomatic concessions with the Turks, had been spared suzerainty for many years. In the process, however, it became the spoils of Catholic princes and wealthy nobility who wandered in, returning from their exploits in the Eastern Mediterranean in the name of Christian faith. These enterprises, ostensibly to cleanse Jerusalem and the HolyLands of the infidel Moslem invaders were known as the 'Crusades.'

These 'Crusaders,' as knights and landed gentry came into great wealth and prosperity in the process, claiming some of the most beautiful islands in the Aegean as their personal properties. Such Catholic opportunists continued to arrive over the next centuries and to establish seaways and trade links to the Holy Land with routes to Asia. Before the Crusades, however, Tinos had gone about its provincial business with its rugged people trading goods with the Phoenicians, nomadic tribes around the Black Sea, and the distant Greek colonies of other islands and mainland peninsulas.

As the merchant class of Italians and Franks began to increase in wealth and trade with greater Europe, the Venetian castle settlements located on the Cycladic islands, insulated from Turkish invasion, became viable centers of trade. The handsome "Tinian green" marble became sought-after in a wider market as the newly-rich palaces, houses and courts of Spain, England and France grew in stature, importance and physical dimension.

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In this ancient stone-cutting town of Pyrgos, to the north of Tinos, a Spanish emissary came one windy day in 1535, arriving by Italian caravel at the port of Panormos. The sails of his ship could be seen from the windy bluffs above and caused quite a panic to the residents of the town, who constantly braced themselves for marauders by sea. The landing party, after confirming good intentions, was escorted on foot and by donkey up the stone path to the marble works of the village by a priest and an official of the island's Venetian governor.

The well-dressed but exhausted Spanish court messenger carried with him the dimensions and plan for a very special order of Tinian marble to be cut and polished by the proprietor of the stone works of Pyrgos. This emissary announced that his "official" patron was willing to wait a year for the order's production-some four-hundred blocks of varying size, to be cut in precise and individual shapes, pre-constructed, and to emulate in assembly the shape and interior space of a small, Mycenaean tholos-style tomb. It was an unusual request for the quarry master and his stone-cutting family, in spite of the growing demand for the green marble's rarity and beauty. It would be a commercial phenomenon which would increase over the subsequent centuries.

The order, however, would require much work, both in the quarrying of the pure material, and the precise cutting of it into the individual blocks, which the emissary was quite precise about. He presented several drawings on leather of the tomb's shape and exact dimensions. It was a request, never made upon the marble cutters previously, though they were remotely familiar with the ancient look of the Mycenaen tholos and no doubt admired the immaculate precision of the former Greek architects from archaic times.

This work requested by the Spaniard would involve the green marble slabs being cut then removed from the mountains, lifted onto barges, and floated around the island from a remote bay known as Droumba. They then would be stacked nearby the stone-work docks of Panormos where the Spaniard's Caravel presently rocked quietly in the protected harbor. Once there, the marble cutter, his brother and son would work over the many months at this location to cut and polish the marble blocks to the specifications requested by the Spanish court emissary. This all was to begin immediately once the details of the transaction were established and agreed upon.

A handsome price was offered by the Spanish court representative, as interpreted by the priest and Venetian island official. In the process the languages of Greek, Spanish and Italian had to be combined in the boisterous interchange. It was also communicated that a bonus would be paid personally to the stone cutter if the order would be waiting there on the dock at Panormos exactly in one year's time.

The details and dimensions were left with the marble cutter, which were neatly rolled and tied in the leather scroll. Along with this official package were seven large leather bags containing one third of the transaction in silver coins-the initial payment for the verdant stones and their cutting. Opening each bag and then counting out their contents, the Venetian official and priest noted the newness and luster of the many pieces of precious metal spread across the stone floor like hundreds of little moons.

This newly minted currency was now known throughout the many ports of Europe as "New World silver"-mined in the Americas by indigenous slave labor and then struck into bars and coins at various New World mints.. The brightly shining payment was a sum that would keep the quarry owner and marble cutter's families comfortable for the next decade. The contract and receipt for the one-third-payment, written in Italian, was overseen by the priest and the Venetian island official, who would together receive one tenth of the total proceeds for their duties.

These documents were signed and sealed with the usual Spanish bureaucratic flair, distinctive of court protocol under the reign of Queen Isabella I. By early afternoon when the winds had arisen to their usual midsummer gusts, the sails of the caravel could be seen billowing out of the port, as she sailed homeward toward the Iberian Peninsula-a location which had recently become the departure point for a the greater South Sea and the mysterious lands and continents beyond it.

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