The history of the Greek manner in Lithuania and Poland evolves as a segmented narrative composed of the given, the imagined, the informed, the expired, the forged, and the believed. It is up to the narrator how to arrange these segments into sequences, to mould them into structures, and to ascribe meanings as well as functions derived from primary evidence and relevant within the historical context. The sporadic character of source materials is both an advantage, as it leaves space for the concepts to work in constructing narratives, as well as a flaw, as it places interpretation on thin ground generous with contradictions and lacunae that can be compensated for neither with words, nor with images. Throughout this narrowly focused and quite intra-cultural inquiry, I tried to pin down Greekness as it surfaced in pictures and was uttered in texts. However, the broader context of late medieval and early modern history and especially its formative events makes it possible to tell the story and draw conclusions despite fragmented paintings and elusive notions. Hence, if reduced to a common denominator, the qualifier Greek when applied to images, meant old. Excluding any possibility of being produced in the present time, in Lithuania and Poland the notion of Greekness was liberated from stylistic allusions pertaining to Italian painting alla greca. This imperative of past time frequently indicated the expiry of skill and sometimes connoted obsolete taste; thence a number of early modern narratives use the attribute ‘old fashioned’ as a synonym for ‘Greek’. Only in singular cases did Greekness correlate with the agency of images, whose antiquity was confirmed by never-ceasing religious devotion. In such instances, the attribute Greek intensified experience of the past by exposing its distance from the present and by synchronizing veneration of an image with the cults of icons with which it was paired. Given the lapse of time between the production of a picture and its identification as Greek, the utterance of Greekness pushed the age of an image back to the time of the apostles.

The appeal of Byzantine murals that functioned within the mode of visual sameness at the residences of Lithuanian grand dukes expired before they were labelled Greek.