Greece’s first certified conservator goes back in time

An icon of Christ dating to the 6th century, part of the collection of Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. According to experts, eye and eyebrow asymmetries point to the artist expressing Christ’s holy and human dimensions. Below right: Tasos Margaritof.

By Yiouli Eptakili

“All I had was my Vespa, my tools and my courage... I was entering a profession that was completely unknown at the time.” Tasos Margaritof shows me his professional license. It is stamped with the number 1, meaning it was the first to ever be issued in Greece, making him the country’s first official art restorer and conservator.

“This job was so widely unknown that I remember a lady asking me if I could look at her plumbing while I was at it,” the man who single-handedly turned the art of conservation in Greece into a science told Kathimerini during a recent interview over coffee at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in central Athens.

Before him, acclaimed artists such as Dimitris Pelekasis and Fotis Kontoglou were called on for the restoration and conservation of great works and artifacts.

“Now that I’ve seen how you do it, I’ll stop,” Margaritof remembers Kontoglou telling him once.

Margaritof, now 90, has trouble reminiscing on a lengthy career that made him one of the country’s finest conservators of ancient art, historical religious icons and mosaics without getting choked up.

A legend in his field, he has handled countless masterpieces, traveled all over Greece, from Santorini and Delos to Vergina and Mystras, and breathed new life into murals from the late Christian, Byzantine and late Byzantine eras, 12th-century hermits’ crypts in Italy, Jerusalem and Sinai, where he was responsible for...