The Candle Maker

After exclamations, hugs, kisses and the obligatory pinching of the cheek, I was welcomed into Kyria Maria’s ancient Candle Making Workshop. I first met Kyria Maria Haramis eight years ago and I was amazed then that a lady in her early seventies had such energy and dedication to produce candles for all the churches in Hydra still using the technique handed down over four generations. Having been away for five years, I was thrilled, when knocking on her door yesterday, (5th November 2015) to find not only was she in but she is still going strong in full production even though she is now in her late seventies!

The first thing you notice when the door opens, is a ‘wall’ of perfume, deep and honey scented, so you can almost taste it. Once your eyes adjust to the gloom, you’ll see that everything has a hazy, pale-orange tint from years of heated beeswax impregnating the very fabric of the building. Everything smells like honey, including Kyria Maria, who likes to work by the light from one window and rarely uses the single light-bulb that swings, stickily, from the high ceiling. The organized clutter, perches in piles around the sides of the room leaving the central floor space free for the seriously, dangerous-looking Gazani filled with molten beeswax.

Kyria Maria has been working as a candle maker for forty-six years. She worked part-time with her husband for twelve years learning the trade. Then, when her husband died in 1982, she continued the family business on her own, full time, in order to bring up her family. Her customers are the Greek Orthodox Churches of Hydra although she is happy to sell her handmade, traditional, beeswax candles to holiday-makers who want something unique to take home with them.

The entire process of hand-making candles has been passed down through the family. It is truly a cottage industry and a labour intensive one at that, which hardly breaks-even, let alone makes a profit, so sadly Kyria Maria feels that without an apprentice to hand the knowledge onto, she is probably the last generation of candle-makers in Hydra.

Every piece of equipment used is an original antique or has been reproduced in the likeness of the original.

Pure cotton string is used to make the wicks. Kyria Maria has a ruled piece of wood with a nail embedded at one end and a blade wedged upright at the required length. Starting at the blade, the string is measured to the nail, round it and back to the blade to be cut. This produces the required length to make two candles at a time.

The large, wide-brimmed ‘gazani’ (gaz-anni, cauldron) in the centre of the room is filled with lumps of beeswax, perched on a tripod over a gently hissing, camping gas-burner and left to heat until the wax is molten.

Above the gazani a heavy-duty hook, at the end of a chain from the ceiling, is used to suspend a wrought iron wheel, which has thirty pegs each holding a double wick, so sixty candles can be made at a time.

Attired in a full length apron, stiff with solidified wax, using a large ‘coutali’ (ladle) in one hand, Kyria Maria gently and slowly scoops the wax up and drizzles it down each wick while using her other hand to rotate the wheel. Alarmingly she does this without the aid of gloves and told me that she has never had an accident. The twinkle in her eye would indicate that she might have been fibbing.

The skinnier and shorter offertory candles that the congregation light when they arrive at church and put in the stands of sand you will see if you visit any church, are made using a bulk ‘dipping’ process.

Kyria Maria has another room to her workshop. It’s more of a narrow corridor with red-painted, flaking walls, which gives is a rather ‘infernoish’ atmosphere. Wicks laced on metal frames are suspended on wooden racks to be dipped. From a black charred gazani, a slim-line trough is filled with the melted wax using the coutali. Kyria Maria takes three metal frames of wicks at a time and dips them into the trough together. To complete their making, dipping is repeated five to six times. When the final coating of wax has hardened, she cuts the wicks off the frames and finally her unique sealing process is carried out.

Kyria Maria uses either pure beeswax, which she obtains from the Peloponnese or ‘migma’ (melted down candles mixed with pure beeswax). Pure beeswax is preferable, when she can get it at a reasonable price, as it binds more easily.

After weighing the finished candles by the kilo on her set of ancient, antique scales and weights, Kyria Maria wraps them up in newspaper and lays them on shelves ready to be sold.

On an average working day, Kyria Maria works for a couple of hours in the morning. Her hours increase when churches have special ‘name days’ or celebrations. The period leading up to the Orthodox ‘Paska’ is her peak time when her working hours increase to eight or nine per day.

Kyria Maria will happily (always with a smile) welcome any passer-by into her workshop whether you want to buy a kilo of unique hand-made candles from her as a real one-off souvenir of your Hydra holiday or you just want to watch her work.