Tama

In a Greek Orthodox church the icons of the most petitioned saints are easy to find: they are the ones dressed in silver. Tamata, the votive plaques of Greek devotion, hang from cords and rails around them, each stamped with an image, eyes for an eye disease, a heart, a leg, a cradled infant for a hoped-for child, a soldier for a son in service, a ship for a safe voyage. The worshipper buys the tama at the candle desk by the door, prays before the icon, and hangs the plaque as the visible half of a private vow; tama means exactly that, a thing vowed.

The practice belongs to the wider Orthodox economy of petition that includes lit candles, oil for the lamps and gifts to the saint's shrine, and the clergy treat it with the same qualified tolerance: the plaque compels nothing, it asks and it thanks. Anthropologists who have studied Greek parish and island religion, Margaret Kenna among them, describe tamata as part of a personal, reciprocal relationship with a particular saint, conducted through that saint's icon as through a window. At the great pilgrimage shrines the accumulation becomes architecture. At the Panagia Evangelistria on Tinos, whose icon of the Annunciation draws pilgrims crawling on their knees each fifteenth of August, the offerings of two centuries hang in masses that are themselves part of what pilgrims come to see.

The tama is the Greek Orthodox member of a very old Mediterranean family. Its embossed rectangles echo the anatomical votives that ancient Greeks left at the sanctuaries of Asklepios, and the resemblance is regularly pointed out; whether it marks continuous descent or the reinvention of an obvious idea is genuinely uncertain, since the documentation between late antiquity and the modern practice is thin. What is certain is the modern form: thin sheet silver or tin, die-stamped by church suppliers in a standard repertoire of images, pierced for a ribbon or wire, sold wherever candles are sold. Reading a rail of tamata is reading a parish's worries.

Clusters of infant plaques hang where couples have prayed for children; eyes and hearts predominate near healing saints; new images enter the repertoire as life changes, cars for safe driving, graduates for examinations. The plaque may be offered with the prayer or after its answer, and families sometimes renew an offering annually, maintaining the relationship rather than closing an account. The custom travels with the diaspora, and Greek churches from Melbourne to Chicago keep tamata beside their icons, as do some other Orthodox communities under Greek influence. Shrine clergy periodically gather older plaques, and precious-metal offerings may be melted to serve the church, a recycling no one considers a breach of the vow, which was completed the day the tama was hung.