BLOOD AND MOSAIC

The basalt fought back Thursday. I was moving heavy stones away from the balk where they lay after we had muscled them out of the the massive collapse in the cardo that leads to our church.

We keep the balk clear a meter or so back from the square for better access to the square. Moreover, our balk is weak. We don’t need a landslide.

But a defiant 100-kilogram building stone clunked me against its neighbor — middle finger, right hand.

“Ouch,” I breathed.

I walked away. I didn’t know exactly where I was going. Toward water. I hoped I wasn’t trailing blood. I didn’t want a fuss.

I found the water jug, took off my glove and washed the finger. Not too bad, I thought — bleeding freely from under the nail. That was good, to flush out infection.

But I knew I needed help. Andrea Chandler and Jess Tewes were in the church nave, where Jess draws our mosaic. I sat under their shade.

Would Andrea get gauze and tape? I didn’t want to bleed on the first-aid kit.

Andrea went. I rose to follow. Jess also acted quickly and instinctively. She pointed a spray bottle at the mosaic where I had been, spritzed it — and wiped off the blood.



OBSESSED

Mosaic does get to be an obsession. Mosaic workers spend long hours sitting and tending these invaluable shapes and images of long ago.

Wide use of mosaics began during the 300s BCE in areas controlled by Greeks and later spread throughout the Roman Empire. By the time of our little church about 600 CE, mosaic was the Byzantine Empire’s major decorative art form.

Mosaic artists create images by setting colored stone and glass in wet mortar. Some of their work is incomparable. An image in a Roman villa at Sephoris 50 kilometers west of here is known as the Mona Lisa of the Galilee. The soft shadings of her face are remarkable, especially considering that she is made of colored stone cubes not quite a centimeter on a side.

She gazes from the floor of a banquet hall just where the host would see her best. Is it an image of his helpmate — reminding him to behave himself at parties? My wife thinks so.

The mosaic at the Susita excavation’s Northeast Church is in relatively poor condition. Rocks fell on it in the great earthquake of about 748 CE, splashing tiles and destroying images. Yet we have geometric shapes and animal legs still intact.

So mosaic is always on our minds as we scrounge toward the floor through dirt and rock — a few cubes together, a slash of color, maybe a complete image? Who knows?

These cubes, or tesserae, are everywhere in the destruction fill. I found an intact section along the wall in our church in 2003 — and straightaway it began to fall apart.


‘DEVIL LOOK’

So I prefer not to work with mosaic. It takes patience and a delicate touch. “Don’t let me near your mosaic,” I tell Ewa Radziejowska, a Warsaw conservator working with us. “It will fall apart if I even see it.”

“You have that devil look!” she says in her merry Polish accent.

Mosaic restorers face a variety of problems as it is. At our Northeast Church, the base is thin for a floor, says Ewa. Artists used about half a meter of base, sometimes mixed with ash to draw still more moisture away from the tesserae.

Our church has only about 10 centimeters of base, and the basalt floor below doesn’t absorb moisture at all. So our tiles loosened over the centuries and our mosaic is in worse shape than, for example, the mosaic in the Northwest Church 100 meters away.


NO MORE MOLES

Plant roots and animals wreak havoc as well. In 2004, a South Dakota farm woman working on mosaic at our church offered to shoot any mole she could find. The burrowers had undermined her carefully cleaned and restored tile. Eventually, says Ewa, mosaic defenders managed to find and block the mole holes. So far, no more moles.

Some people take quickly to the painstaking work, says Ewa. Who can blame them for enjoying it — even obsessing?

Like the original artists, they put a lot of sweat into their craft, maybe even a few tears. And now some blood. Albeit mine, not theirs.