Tinos, June 1993. Somewhere behind the sharp cape that borders the bay of Livada, an ancient lighthouse is hidden. Waves come from the northern Aegean like galloping horses. Renting a camera, film, and telephoto lens, I set off on a solitary hike, blindly searching for a fleeting old lighthouse. “He has a long way to go, and there are even rocks. Be careful, says the shepherd I meet on my way. Half an hour later, the lighthouse silently appears in the landscape, arrogant, indifferent to my overland passage. His gaze is directed towards the sea, the strait and its dangers. He knows well why it was built there eighty years ago. He illuminates the great sea road that passes before him, and he does this in the company of his brothers: Armenistis, opposite Mykonos, and Gria, on Andros. At night, every night, they have been secretly talking together for many years.

A few days later, in my room in Athens, I look at the photographs pinned to the wall. They give out that in the end I did not manage to get close to him, except through a telephoto lens. But they make me want to find someone like him. Where do they exist, where do they hide, where can I find information about them, photographs, archives, books, documents?

“History of lighthouses of the Greek coasts” of 1918 – the beginning of the study. Written by the director of the Lighthouse Service, Stylianos Lykoudis, the “father” of the modern Greek lighthouse network in Ermoupoli, it was the inspiration for the first excursions. After a while, beacons come to life in front of me, which I read in his words and lists, each with its own character. The old woman of Andros is like a tower that has escaped from the chessboard, Aspropunda Folegandros is a lonely chapel with a cylindrical bell tower.

The feeling that these buildings have a metaphysical dimension, sacred, venerable and at the same time innocent, unpolluted and modest – as in the case of chapels – was present in most of the Cycladic lighthouses that I visited in the early 90s. The same feeling in Korakas on Paros and Katapola on Amorgos, the same monastic silence in the steep, ruined lighthouse at Kamares on Sifnos. And everyone always has the same impression: that they are alive, like human beings with breath and soul, like ships that nevertheless forced them to speak to them.

The corresponding bibliography turned out (like its subject matter) to be enigmatic. However, with a little perseverance, he found diamonds. So was Pharos: The Lighthouse Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, written in 1985 by an engineer named Kenneth-Sutton Jones, who was director of Chance Brothers, one of Britain’s largest lighthouse optical equipment companies. This book was the perfect introduction to the wonderful world of British and French lighthouses, which, especially in the 19th century, were measured by technology, innovation and pioneering. It was a time when the British were doing miracles like Eddyston Lighthouse, Beachy Head or Bishop Rock, or that mythical giant Fastnet, which resembles a symbol of the unconscious, at the “entrance to Europe” outside of Ireland. Yet the eccentric French seem to have outdone them (at least in sophistication and design). Their network of lighthouses on the Atlantic coast is a huge open museum of architecture and technology.

British and French lighthouses, mostly in the 19th century, were equal in technology, innovation and pioneering.

I first admired the elegance of French lighthouses inside the old walls of the seaside town of Saint-Malo, on a winter evening in the 1990s, in a small bookstore and specifically in the pages of two small local publications: in “Les Phares et Leurs Gardiens” (“Lighthouses and their keepers”) and Les Phares D’Ouessant (The Lighthouses of Ouessant), little books that, in the pre-Internet era, revealed architectural marvels like La Jument and Kereon, lone dreamlike towers rising in the middle of the sea and hidden inside sumptuous little (but lonely) palaces. , the gigantic mansion of Corduan (“the king of lighthouses and the lighthouse of kings” as the French say), the 50s modernism of the towering Roche Dover, whose base looks like a huge steamship ready to dock, the electrified, terrifying pillars of Nividik and the mighty radiance of his lighthouse Creac ‘h, the strongest in Europe, radiating wildness at the mouth of the Atlantic, on the island of Ouessant, an island that shortly after in the maritime bookstore “Outremer” in Paris, a bookseller with informed me that it was accompanied by the popular expression “Qui voit Ouessant, voit son sang” (“Whoever sees Ouessant sees his blood.” ). From him I also learned about the great French photographers Jean Guichard and Philippe Plisson, who, years before drones, flew helicopters over biblical storms to capture some of the most famous aerial photographs of Brittany’s lighthouses, where their towers are completely enveloped in giant ocean waves. .

At the same time, a few blocks away, in St. Germain’s comic book stores, I found lighthouses that play a major role even in the frames of the ninth art: the French stylist Serge Klerk created a police mystery called “Meurtre Dans Le Phare” (“Murder on lighthouse”), and the talented Spanish illustrator Migelanjo Prado created a touching, metaphysical human drama, unfolding on a rocky island under the shadow of an extinct lighthouse in the middle of the ocean, called “Trait de Craie” (‘chalk line’).

At home, in the late 90s, two magnificent albums were modestly but grandiosely published by the Ammos publishing house, both “bibles” for farolatrs. In 1996, Gysis Papageorgiou (who was Deputy Director of the Navy’s Lighthouse Service) produced The Stone Lighthouses of Greece, a collection of beautiful watercolors of all the stone lighthouses we have observed, and the following year, photographer Yiannis Skoulas presented the result of a four-year end-to-end lighthouse photography of the country, “an endless excursion, the prisoner of which I gradually became,” as he writes in the introduction to the publication.

And who, shall we say, is the most historic, most iconic, most impressive of our lighthouses? The answer probably lies in Didimi, a hermitage at the entrance to the port of Ermoupolis. Designed in 1834 by Bavarian architect Johann Erlacher, this 29-meter stone tower (the tallest in our Faroese network) has nothing to do with white Cycladic lanterns that look like chapels. He is polite and majestic, a true reflection of his city. When, due to a breakdown last winter, it did not work for several days, it seemed that something was missing in Ermoupolis itself. In fact, last Sunday, World Lighthouse Day, citizen mobilization brought a traditional dance event to its doorstep that signaled Syrians’ intent to offer it urgent maintenance and repairs. For them, this is not just a spark on a stone tower, but a significant symbol.

Such beacons in the era of the Internet and GPS no longer have the practical value they once had. Yet their existence is intimately linked to ours. Sea travelers, islanders, sailors, sailors, fishermen, without them, would sail on silent, impersonal, cruel seas. Their lonely, silent and selfless brand symbolizes the human presence in the harsh expanses of the sea, safety in the midst of dangers and light in the darkness.

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