Repointing the terrace wall, by hand
Forty metres of dry stone, two masons from Sifnos who would not hear of mortar, and the slowest and most expensive four weeks of our year.
The wall along the second terrace is the original, which means it was built without mortar by someone who was paid by the day in 1907 and knew exactly what he was doing. Ninety years of rain and one earthquake later, about a third of it had moved enough that we stopped letting people lean on it.
Manolis and his son came over from Sifnos in the second week of March and took four weeks over forty metres, which sounds slow until you watch it. Every stone comes out, gets turned in the hand, and goes back in the one orientation where it locks against its neighbours. There is no adhesive and no reinforcement. The wall holds because of friction and because of the judgement of a man who has done this since he was fourteen.
We asked, carefully, whether it would be faster to point it with lime mortar. Manolis said it would, and that in thirty years the mortar would be the thing that failed, and that his father had rebuilt walls that had been pointed in the sixties and were now worse than the ones nobody had touched.
So: no mortar. It cost more than twice what a mortared repair would have, it is finished, and it will outlast the hotel.
