Processions, orgies and pomegranate seeds — women's festivals in Ancient Greece
The Ancient Greeks loved to celebrate. Their calendar was full of different events throughout the year, and they cherished their longstanding traditions. One major festival meant for a wide audience was a religious procession in honor of the goddess Demeter, beginning in Athens and going to Eleusis. This route was called hieros dromos, the holy road. Rituals were performed in Eleusis as part of a so-called mystery cult. Another similar public celebration was Panathenaia. During this festival, an olivewood statue representing the goddess Athena was carried from the temple at the Acropolis to the harbor in Piraeus. There the statue was ritually bathed in seawater.
Many ancient celebrations had pre-Greek roots. For example, Athena was worshipped and Panathenia was celebrated in regions of Greece even before the arrival of the Greeks' ancestors. Old European loanwords are associated with these festivities, e.g. thiasos, “a religious procession”; megaron, “the interior space of a temple”; orgia, “secret rituals of mystery cults”; and theatron, “theatre” (originally meaning “the final performance of a religious procession”). Certain elements of this vocabulary remain a part of the cultural lexicon of contemporary Western languages.
Apart from general celebrations, women and men also organized their own festivities. Men celebrated in symposia, where they discussed philosophical matters and enjoyed food, wine, music and poetry recitals. Women's celebrations were religious. They were organized by aristocratic women, but women from all social classes participated in them.
Pomegranates.
The most important celebration was a religious festival called Thesmophoria, organized exclusively for women in honor of the goddess Demeter. Demeter's name consists of two elements: de "earth", which is an Old European loan word, and meter "mother", which is Indo-European in origin. In the family tree of ancient goddesses, Demeter was the daughter of the Old European Earth Mother, and her fertility cult belonged to Old European tradition. The celebrants believed that the goddess had once made an agreement with the farmers to protect their work and bless their harvest. The literal translation of the festival's name is "an agreement made in the traditional way". Thesmophoria was celebrated in October, when the Autumn seeds were sown into the fields for the next growing season. It was celebrated everywhere Greeks lived: in the central regions of continental Greece, in cities established by Greek immigrants around the Mediterranean coast, as well as in the archipelagos, such as in Sicily.
In Athens, the location of the Thesmophoria festival was very special and full of symbolism. Women gathered at the hill of the Acropolis, facing opposite the Pnyx, a hill with a pre-Greek name. The Pnyx was especially significant for Athenian democracy: at its top was the "parliament" where politicians assembled. According to Ancient Greek social structure, only men could participate in the meetings. Women had no business on the top of the Pnyx. Instead, they gathered at the foot of the hill where the men, for their part, had no business. In both a symbolic and concrete sense, the foot of the hill was in touch with the earth. The exact program of this three-day festival remains clandestine - it was a holy mystery cult, after all. However, it is known that women told stories about Demeter and her daughter Kore, who Hades seized to the underworld, and who later became Persephone. The women also ate pomegranate seeds. The pomegranate is considered a symbol of fertility.
Ancient Greek celebrations also included dancing. The most popular dance was called hora, which was danced already in Old Europe. Hora-dancing has been documented with archeological artifacts: archeologists have found vases with relief designs of nude women dancing in a circle. Dancing women were also depicted in small statuettes, such as have been discovered in the sanctuary of Olympia, among other places. Hora-dancing has lived on throughout the ages, despite authorities prohibiting so-called pagan celebrations during the spread of Christianity. "Hora" is still the name used for this type of dance in slavic languages in the Balkan region, whereas in Greek it is "choros". Hora is still popular in Southeastern Europe, and is danced by both men and women. There is also a variation of hora which is practiced only by women, and it has reached a dignified age of at least 7000 years.
A bronze statue of nude women circle-dancing, found in the sanctuary of Olympia, circa 700 BCE.
Harald Haarmann, Virpi Lehtinen and Auli Kurvinen
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