Numbering the slates
How a roof of four thousand stones was taken apart and put back, one at a time.
Zagori roofs are made of the same grey limestone as the walls, split into thin, irregular slabs and laid overlapping on wooden battens, heavy enough that the wind cannot lift them. Our roof has about four thousand of them. When we bought the house perhaps a third were broken, and the battens under all of them were rotten.
The masons from Konitsa, Vasilis and his nephew, lifted every slate, wrote a number on the back in chalk, and stacked them in rows in the courtyard in order. It took them five weeks. Then they relaid the battens in chestnut, and put the slates back in the same places, replacing the broken ones with slate from a collapsed barn in the next village.
Katerina asked why not simply lay them in any order. Vasilis said that each slate had spent a hundred and fifty years settling against its neighbours, and they fitted each other now and nothing else. The roof has not leaked since.
When it snows, the slates hold a thick blanket that stays for days, and the house underneath is noticeably warmer. The old builders knew what they were doing.