A painting that left Florida more than a century ago is hanging in a church on Aegina.
Immigrants from Aegina gave the work — a religious icon — to St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Tarpon Springs in 1910. The Gulf Coast town was, and is, a centre of Greek sponge-diving families. The church is now a cathedral.
A fire damaged the piece. In 1923 it went back to Greece for restoration. It never returned.
Mayor John Koulianos flew to Greece in July to look for it and to settle a twin-city deal between Tarpon Springs and Aegina. He says he did both. The mayor of Aegina rang a priest who knew where the painting was. Koulianos found it on the wall of a local church.
He told Fox 13 Tampa Bay it is about the size of a movie poster — “a little bit too big to put in a suitcase.” He joked that grabbing it was not an option.
Local officials are now talking to church leaders about bringing it home. The mayor’s post dates the work to the Byzantine period; that claim sits with the icon’s keepers, not a published lab date.
Source: Mayor John Koulianos /
