Under a fig tree in Mesotopos, Lesbos's last stonemason still listens for the stone to crack

Loukas Kontos, 85, has been splitting rock in the village of Mesotopos since he was a boy working beside his father. People describe him as the last traditional stone craftsman of Lesbos. He still builds the dry stone walls that once ran across the whole island.

He was about ten when he first picked up the tools, working alongside his father, Stavros Kontos. By twelve he was already working on houses. Later, with his father's help, he built his own stone house by hand. His wife, Vasso, worked beside him on building jobs, and together they raised two daughters, Angela and Myrsini.

On Lesbos, men of his trade were called petrades. Mesotopos, a village in the island's southwest, 74 kilometres from the capital Mytilene, was known for builders who worked stone cut by hand. The masons split large boulders with iron wedges, sometimes as many as fifteen in a single rock, and used no power tools. Then they dressed the pieces with picks.

Kontos remembers what that work was worth. About sixty years ago, he says, the workers sold each cut building stone for two to three drachmas. A stone of that kind weighed around 100 kilograms, and a skilled mason could produce five or six in a day.

He no longer does the fine stonecutting he once did for houses. What remains is the older, humbler craft of xerolithies: dry stone walls, built without mortar, each stone held in place by its weight and by how well it fits the next. He still builds and repairs them on his own land. His tools are the same ones he has always used: a pointed needle tool, a chisel, a right angle, a hammer, the sledgehammer, a wooden measuring rod and metal blades.

The sun and the work have weathered his face like the earth he works. His body is still muscular and his gaze is bright. When he speaks about his craft, he talks less about technique than about the moment the stone gives way.

“When you strike a boulder with the sledgehammer, at some point you hear a vibration, a tremor. The stone cracks and opens in two. That is definitely satisfaction.”

His knowledge now has a formal place in the world. In 2018, UNESCO added the art of dry stone walling to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, after a joint nomination by Greece and seven other European countries. Two years later, a 256-page study by Christos N. Chatzilas, published by the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation, recorded the stonemasons of Lesbos from 1850 to 1950.

Books and lists can describe the craft. They cannot make the sound the stone makes when it opens. For that there is still one man in Mesotopos, under his fig tree, waiting for the tremor.