There's a Byzantine mosaic under a rug in a cafe near my house and nobody cares
There's a cafe two streets from my apartment, been there forty years, looks like nobody touched the decor since 1992. I go there sometimes when I need to get out of the studio but don't want to go far. Last month I noticed the corner of a rug was lifting near the counter, and underneath there's clearly a mosaic floor. Not a good one, late Byzantine, provincial work, big tesserae, crude faces, but unmistakable.
I asked the owner. She said "yeah, we put the rug over it because customers said it was ugly."
I'm not making this up. A thousand-year-old floor and people found it offensive to their frappes.
I told her what it was and she shrugged. Said I could lift the rug if I wanted, she doesn't care. So now I go once a week and uncover a bit more, drink my coffee, stare at this thing that's survived empires and earthquakes and is now being protected from criticism by a machine-woven rug from IKEA.
Anyway. If anyone needs me I'll be on my knees with a soft brush and a very patient waiter.🙂
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
this is the kind of thing that makes me want to scream honestly. not in a mad way just. the sheer weight of it and people said it was ugly so they covered it. i think about all the things we've buried or plastered over because they didn't fit what we wanted to see.
the mosaic doesn't care though. it's still there under the rug doing its thousand-year-old thing. that's kind of what i love about old stuff. it outlasts our opinions of it.
That's it exactly. The mosaic doesn't need us to see it. It was there before the cafe, before the building probably, before anyone thought to call it ugly. It'll be there after the rug rots and the cafe closes and someone else digs it up again.
There's something in that for us too, I think. The work that doesn't need defending. You just make it and it sits there, and what people think about it now is not the last word.
That's the part that got me too. The work that doesn't need defending. I spend weeks on a piece sometimes, and there's a point where you stop caring whether it's good and you just know it's true. Different thing entirely.
The mosaic under that rug doesn't know it's covered. It's just sitting there being a floor. There's something ridiculously grounding in that.
"it outlasts our opinions of it", yes, exactly. That's the whole thing right there. I keep thinking about those Byzantine faces, crude as they are, looking up at the underside of a rug for thirty years, and they're fine. They don't need us to admire them.
Makes you wonder what else is sitting under rugs and linoleum and bad 90s wallpaper, just waiting. Most of it's probably gone forever. But some of it's still there.