AP reports from Athens that Haralambos Goumas is a man who fashions gods out of clay — a reversal of most ancient creation myths in which the gods make the men.
During the past half-century, Goumas, 67, has produced thousands of large terracotta statues of ancient Greek deities, mythical figures and fabulous beasts, mostly for use as architectural and garden ornaments.
They are a rare survival of a vanishing art in recession-battered Greece, all made by hand using traditional techniques in a western Athens workshop squeezed in among warehouses, small industries and a railyard.
“I guess that in my lifetime I have made many more statues than those in China’s Terracotta Army,” Goumas told the Associated Press.
Much like the 2,200-year old, life-sized sculptures of about 9,000 soldiers and imperial officials dug up in northwestern China, many of Goumas’ pieces stand in tidy ranks, in a yard fronting the long, metal-roofed shed with its old-fashioned wood-fired furnace where he works.
Others are scattered apparently randomly: an Athena here, a horse or a satyr there, among bulls’ heads, griffins, sphinxes, garden urns or busts of 5th-century B.C. Athenian philosopher Socrates next to the 19th-century Greek poet Dionysios Solomos. There’s even a Christ somewhere.
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Source: thenationalherald.com
