เครื่องรางทามา (แผ่นโลหะถวายของกรีก)Tamaτάμα

Go and stand in front of a much-visited Greek icon and you will not see the icon. You will see silver.

A tama is offered either as a reminder of what the petitioner needs or in thanks for a prayer already answered — the cited account puts both uses on the same object and does not separate them, and the offering is usually made with a prayer and sometimes with a votive candle lit beside it. The shape aims it. A heart may mean a heart condition or it may mean love. Eyes mean an eye affliction. Hands or legs mean maladies of the limbs.

The Spanish-speaking world's milagro is the same object and the atlas says so on that record. Here is what a reader standing on this page gets that the milagro page cannot give: the tama has a named origin story with a hand in it. John of Damascus, serving as vizier to the caliph al-Walid I, was falsely accused of treachery and had his hand cut off. Praying before an icon of the Theotokos, he found the hand restored. In thanks he had a silver replica of it made and fixed it to the icon. That icon, called Trojeručica — the Three-handed — is preserved at Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, and it is the reason the story is not just a story: the object it describes is still on the wall.

Inference — the difference between the two traditions is where the metal goes, not what it means. A milagro hangs on a robe or a retablo in a Catholic church and also, sometimes, gets carried in a pocket for luck. A tama goes onto the icon, and the icon is not a picture of a saint in Orthodox practice but the place the saint is met. The plaque is therefore pinned to a person, in the tradition's own terms, rather than to a painting of one.

Tamata are not the only thing left. Orthodox Christians also offer candles, prosphora — the bread baked for the liturgy — wine, oil and incense, and many leave something of their own worth instead: jewellery, a pectoral cross, a military decoration. Inference — a medal a man was given for war, hung on an icon because a prayer was answered, is the most compressed object in this whole atlas.

They are bought in shops selling Greek Orthodox religious goods, and the practice runs beyond Greece: the cited account records tamata in Italy too, particularly in the south, where they stand next to the Catholic ex-voto trade rather than instead of it.

Stamped or cast, pierced, threaded with a ribbon, and hung on a pole or a hook by the icon — the hanging done by the petitioner, with a prayer, sometimes with a candle. Nothing consecrates the plaque before it is offered; the offering is the act. They accumulate. What a church does with a wall of them after some years is not described by the sources read here, and this record does not guess.

Still sold in Greek Orthodox religious-goods shops and still hung on icons in Greece and in southern Italy, and wherever the Greek diaspora has built a church. No dated price was read for this record.