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.