Sculpture Garden of the Gods

The Greek island of Ikaria has gained notoriety lately for being a so-called “Blue Zone,” one of the select places on the planet where people live the longest. This otherwise obscure island was also known to the Ancients as the birthplace of the Greek god of ecstasy and wine, Dionysus, who was born upon the rocky ridge of mountain that runs down the center of the island.

   SCULPTURE GARDEN OF THE GODS, a book of black and white photographs, and prose, is the fruit of writer and photographer Thomas K. Shor’s three winters upon this mountain—often blown by hurricane-force winds and engulfed in thick fog.

   Shor weaves the poetic force of his eye with that of his pen to take us on a journey to this otherworldly landscape, where lashing winds sculpt solid granite into forms that look like living beings with an uncanny regularity. It is a place of mystery and beauty, where the most enduring is dissolved by the most fleeting, where wisps of fog blown by a gale can cause an entire mountainside to disappear in an instant. It is a landscape that elicits a deep sense of wonder.

   Not only do great expanses of space open out on this mountain, but time opens out as well: Fresh cracks occur and are rounded by the years. Rocks balance for centuries before succumbing to a fissure. Stories are told in stone that are thousands of years old, forming a continuity from geologic times to our own.

   The rock formations are so strange and improbable—in seeming defiance of the logic that shapes landscapes—that one cannot help but wish one could go there with a geologist who could explain how it could have been left that way by nature, how such forms occur, how one huge granite boulder could have been left balancing so delicately upon another.

   Yet to have the eye of a geologist, to ‘understand’ the ravages of time that quite certainly led to this hauntingly beautiful and otherworldly landscape, would threaten the mystery of the place.

   SCULPTURE GARDEN OF THE GODS, with its 190 black-and-white photographs, takes us on a journey to this mythic yet very real landscape which gave birth to Dionysus, where the animating wind has been sculpting matter for untold millennia, giving breath to stone and bringing it to life.