Church of Saint George

Saint George in Spaniakos — the church painted orange Lassithiotakis wrote one word next to this church: Εφθαρμένες. Destroyed. It is not known when he wrote it — but he was right, and since then more has happened. The church stands in the village cemetery in Spaniakos. At some point it was probably what dozens of similar buildings are in Selino — a single-naved chapel with frescoes, anonymous, modest, set into the landscape. Today it is painted in bright pastels: a cream body, an orange apse, an orange gable. New plaster has covered the stone. The cemetery has grown up around it — marble gravestones stand right against the walls. Inside, the lower parts of the walls have been whitewashed. The upper parts were left alone. The frescoes are still there: a narrative scene with a figure in a yellow cloak, a band of apostles or hierarchs, a few faces still legible. Blue backgrounds in the blind arcades. Losses, algae, flaking plaster. A newer iconostasis, a tiled floor in a geometric pattern, icons from various periods hung across the whitewashed walls. The church is in use. Someone lights candles, someone brings flowers. Nobody conserves the frescoes. There is not much to see here in an iconographic sense. There is something else instead — a picture of what happens to heritage when there is no system of care, and the local community does what it can and how it knows how. Without malice. Just like this.