My parents have a Cypriot clay bowl that dates from 2000 BC. As family treasures go, it's no big deal. It’s not rare. It's not important or beautiful. It's a slightly misshapen, un-decorated terracotta drinking bowl that was probably used by a family of moderate wealth in antiquity to drink water from.
It's not particularly valuable either. You can purchase older, prettier Greek pottery online for a few hundred dollars. I've seen hundreds of similar bowls in museums all over the world.
But I love that bowl. When I was a kid I used to trace my fingers along the cup’s crooked lip, its rounded bowl dimpled by the fingerprints of whoever made it, the surface pitted and smoothed over by centuries of use, and centuries more of being buried under some pile of rubble outside modern day Nicosia. When the Turks fought the Greeks in the years before my family lived in Cyprus, that bowl had already seen enough of the world. It had survived countless battles and skirmishes as the great empires of history transferred power, the Assyrians, the Byzantine, the Franks, the Ottomans, the British. Maybe the pottery survived because it was so plain, so forgettable. It didn’t have a crack on it.
I love that bowl, partly because of its history, but mostly because it was ours. Mine. Here was I, a suburban kid, moving an ancient artefact around in my hands in the sunken living room of my parents’ house in middle class suburbia. I was in Canada in the 1990s, and keenly aware that the bowl I was holding had not been broken in 4000 years.
Some will say the bowl belongs in a museum where many more people can ponder it, enjoy it for what it is, an historical artefact. I treasure that bowl precisely because it wasn't behind museum glass, because I am its custodian, because I can touch it, and break it, so it is my personal responsibility to keep it safe.
There were transgressions. When I was about ten, I once filled the bowl with milk and cereal – just once – for the thrill of eating out of it, of sharing that experience with antiquity. Kellogg's Corn Flakes and a clay bowl, corporate America and the Hellenic world meeting in my breakfast nook.
I did it because it was risky, because it was forbidden; I did it for the thrill of making the bowl useful again.
I wouldn’t do it again. But I’m glad I did.
– Yannick