Sisyphus Jewelry

Athens · Greece

Mariana

“With persistence you can do everything, and you find beauty.”

Sisyphus Jewelry casts nothing before someone orders it: every silver ring, earring and pendant is designed and made by Marianna herself in her Athens workshop, finished by hand so the surface keeps a trace of the filing and polishing. The idea of working in silver had sat at the back of her mind for years, until she took a jewellery class in 2022, then another, then another.

I have three questions for you, and something in return.

Three questions.

Selected pieces

Sisyphus Jewelry Accessories · Athens, Greece

Named after a man who never finishes

Marianna called her jewellery after Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a rock up a hill and watch it roll back down, for ever. She meant it as a compliment.

In most retellings the myth is the definition of pointless work. She reads it the other way round. What she takes from Sisyphus is persistence, and the idea that beauty is something you only reach by staying with a thing longer than is reasonable. Making a ring works the same way. It is cast, then filed, then polished, and then filed again, and the difference between a piece that is finished and one that is nearly finished are the hours nobody sees.

A name you have to explain twice

It is not an obvious choice in Greece. Greeks love the old mythology, she says, but do not go about being proud of it, because the country would rather be seen moving on than living off its past. So the name is meant as a symbol and not as a costume. Outside Greece it lands differently again: every German she meets asks whether the brand is named after the nightclub in Berlin.

Where the patterns come from

A piece usually starts as a note. She sees something, a painting on a wall, the print on somebody's t-shirt, and writes it down on her phone or draws it on paper. The sighting becomes a pattern, and the pattern comes back later, on a ring first and then on a pair of earrings, so that pieces made months apart still belong to each other. Alongside that she reads about the older jewellery of Greece and Italy, which is a deep enough subject to last a career. She has never used a digital design tool and does not intend to. Working by hand, she says, is the only way to know how the finished thing will feel, and something is lost in the creation if you skip it.

Ten to fourteen working days

Nothing is cast before somebody orders it. Every piece is cast, then filed and polished by hand, and the surface keeps a trace of that. The shop says so on each item: a piece may carry small details that make it one of a kind. The stones set into those uneven bands are lab grown, zirconia and corundum, in amethyst purple, olive brown and emerald green. Between an order and a parcel sit ten to fourteen working days. New designs arrive through the year rather than in seasons, because there is only one pair of hands and they are also doing the filing.