Photos © Larry Hamill

Joyce Griffiths, owner of Byzantium, holds a string of glass beads made by artist Jimi Kola from old lamps – by far the biggest beads around!

On a sunny spring day, Joyce Griffiths removes a clear plastic tray packed with a dozen tiny plastic boxes from a display case at the Short North bead mecca, Byzantium. She pulls a thumbnail-sized jade-colored figurine from one of the boxes and rests it in the palm of her hand.

“Art Deco Buddhas,” Griffiths marvels as she looks at the little figure smiling up at her. “Who’d’ve thought?”

The same question might be asked of Byzantium itself: who’d’ve thought a bead specialty shop would withstand the whims of fickle markets for nearly 25 years? Who’d’ve thought Byzantium would evolve from a bead store into nothing short of a center for the study and celebration of the bead?

Since opening in June of 1985, Byzantium, at 1088 N. High St., has grown steadily – even as the popularity of beading and beadwork has waxed and waned – and has branched out into other types of collectibles. The result: a full-out cultural experience through the lens of beads, antique silver jewelry and other curios, much of which you’re not likely to find under the same roof elsewhere in Columbus.

At Byzantium’s quarter-century milestone, its owner, Joyce Griffiths, reflects on how the store came to be, how it came to be hers and what it will have to do to stay afloat for another 25 years.

Libby
To know the story of Byzantium, one must first know the story of its founder. In the early 1980s, Libby Gregory was a joint owner of Trade Winds, a campus-area vendor of eclectic gift items: T-shirts, incense, jewelry and loose beads.

Kat Agdinaoay was a regular customer and, later, an employee at Trade Winds during Gregory’s years there in the early 1980s. At that time, Agdinaoay lived around the corner from the store, which she visited often to comb through the glass jar of penny beads Gregory had on display at the bead counter.

“She (Gregory) would be at the bead counter while I was sifting through the things and we’d just kind of talk about things,” Agdinaoay said. “I would come in there and just stand there for hours and go through them.”

One day Gregory invited Agdinaoay to come to work for Trade Winds. The offer took her by surprise, but it also made sense.

“I think she thought that that seemed like something that she would like to have in an employee, someone who loved the stuff,” Agdinaoay said.

When Gregory inherited some money upon her mother’s death, she decided the time was ripe to own her own business. She bought a row of properties in the 200-block of W. King Ave. and, in the summer of 1985, opened a store devoted to her beloved beads and catering to people interested in the culture and aesthetics of beads and beadwork. She called the place Byzantium, a nod to the ancient empire and commercial center. Agdinaoay joined Gregory’s staff there in 1986.

Haitian Voudou banner used in ceremonies to summon intermediary spirits. May contain 20,000 to 30,000 sequins.

At Byzantium, Agdinaoay says, Gregory guided her into the world of beads.

“She knew so much stuff and she had a bunch of cats and she was always saying ‘Hold out your paw,’ and you’d hold out your hand and she’d put some sort of little treasure in it that she would tell you about,” Agdinaoay said.

Those little treasures could have been white hearts, beads with luminous white middles that glow through a translucent red coating. Or they might have been Ethiopian telsum beads, silver beads of different shapes, each representing a different prayer and traditionally given as gifts on the birth of a child. Or they might have been Lewis and Clark beads – one of Agdinaoay’s favorites – reputed to have been what Lewis and Clark traded with Native Americans on their expedition out west. Or they might have been Indian skull beads, large or small, which Gregory bought from someone in her international network of bead traders.

Agdinaoay found all of these types of beads – and more – at Byzantium. Many exotic beads now appear in Agdinaoay’s personal collection of strung beads and finished beaded jewelry, all of which she made after starting work at Byzantium. She says Gregory allowed her staff members one day each week to select merchandise from the store from which to create jewelry to sell at Byzantium. Agdinaoay says the opportunity to learn beadwork and jewelry making – and the chance to have her work displayed and sold at Byzantium – helped her discover her own creativity.

“(Gregory) definitely was one of the great mentors in my life,” Agdinaoay said. “I was a little seed and she watered me and let me see that what I could do was good and that I had talent. That was a whole new thing for me. And I think she did that for other people, too.”

Enter Joyce

By the time Agdinaoay had embarked on what would become a 12-year career at Byzantium, the store’s future owner had already become a regular customer. In the summer of 1985, mere weeks after Gregory opened Byzantium’s doors, Joyce Griffiths, a pharmacist-turned-veterinarian, arrived in Columbus from Ann Arbor, Mich., to attend graduate school in veterinary pharmacology at Ohio State. A seasoned beader, Griffiths was exploring her new neighborhood one day and came upon Byzantium. Griffiths says it was a bead store the likes of which had been few since the beadwork trend of the 1960s and ’70s had waned with the decline of what she calls “Hippiedom.”

Tammy Irwin (left) has been working at Byzantium for 14 years, longer than any other employee. Corby Beller, at right, is the newest hire, 8 years ago.

Griffiths and Gregory became friends and that same year established the Bead Society of Central Ohio. All of Byzantium’s employees and beaders from other walks of life met regularly at Byzantium, and later in another nearby space Gregory owned, to hear lectures on the cultural history of beads and hone their bead-working skills. Gregory eventually started the Ohio Bead Art Competition, which gave visibility to bead workers’ creations.

A former employee of both Byzantium and the next-door King Avenue Coffeehouse, which Gregory opened in 1986, Del Sroufe started beading and became a prizewinner in the Ohio Bead Art Competition and began his career as a professional chef under Gregory’s mentoring. Sroufe, the founder of Wellness Forum Foods, had been a frequent customer of the King Avenue Coffeehouse, where one of his friends worked. When in 1989 he mentioned that he was looking for some managerial experience, Gregory hired him as the coffee house’s assistant manager.

After years of listening to Gregory in the coffee house’s menu development meetings, Sroufe had fully digested her expectations for the vegetarian restaurant’s fare. In the mid-1990s, a few years after Gregory’s death, he started creating vegan baked goods for the coffee house.

“I was allowed to have a creative outlet there that I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten at other places without that kind of freedom,” Sroufe said.

Sroufe’s vegan baked goods became the foundational product line for Del’s Bread, which Sroufe opened in 1997. Sroufe later ran Del’s Home Cooking out of his home. He joined the Wellness Forum in 2006.

But even before Sroufe started working for Byzantium in the early 1990s, Gregory had led him to the bead.

“I became a bead fanatic before I ever went to work there (Byzantium), almost from day one of working at the coffee house, and she (Gregory) fostered that,” Sroufe said. “She loved beads, and she wanted everyone to love beads too. She was always putting strands of beads in your hands and saying, ‘feel that. Doesn’t that feel great?’ You were always learning about some trade bead that was very rare at some point.”

Sroufe remembers some of the exotic beads Gregory had on hand, like expensive, Czech-made chevron beads and multi- colored Japanese sugar beads. Sroufe also remembers telling Gregory about some of the bead stores where he had shopped on visits with his father in California. Gregory decided to check out some of the West Coast shops, and on Feb. 1, 1991, she and Byzantium employee Shelly Stambaugh flew to Los Angeles en route to an annual gem stone trade show in Tucson.

A mask representing a corn or fertility god, carved and hand-painted by Guatemalan mask maker Arturo Aj Canil.

They never made it.

Sroufe was out of town when Gregory and Stambaugh’s plane crashed upon landing at a Los Angeles airport. When he got back to Columbus and went to the coffee house, he dissolved into tears with two of his co-workers. They all wanted to keep Gregory’s dream alive.

“One thing we wanted to do was carry on Libby’s legacy,” Sroufe said. “Byzantium was a safe haven, if you will, in a commercial-industrial world. There was this place that was just art and beauty. And the coffee house – there weren’t very many vegetarian restaurants around at the time. So we knew there was an importance to what we were doing.”

Immediately after Gregory’s death, Byzantium’s fate rested in the hands of her brother, Ohio State University history professor Tim Gregory. The year before her death, Libby Gregory had tried to recruit Griffiths to work part-time for Byzantium, but Griffiths had declined the offer. Faced with Gregory’s death, and hoping to keep Byzantium alive, Griffiths dug up the offer of employment Gregory had made her and presented it to Tim Gregory.

“I said I would step in and run this store until he could figure out what he wanted to do,” Griffiths said.

Tim Gregory took Griffiths up on her offer. The job was a match for Griffiths: she could call upon her experience as pharmacist and manager of a small Denver, Co., drug store to run Byzantium, and she knew a lot about the beads in the store’s stock. But mostly, Griffiths says, the job was a good fit because Libby Gregory had all but placed her in it.

“Libby always had a way of choosing people to do things that she wanted them to do,” Griffiths said. “She was always looking for people to fill niches in her plans, and I guess that was a niche that I seemed to fill and it seemed to work. So I kind of feel like she asked me to come in and step in.”

In December 1992, Griffiths bought Byzantium. She has seen the store through the ebb and flow of the highly cyclical bead market and through its move, in January 2000, to its larger present location on High St. But even though Griffiths has carried the business forward, she says she and others felt Gregory’s presence at Byzantium long after her death.