The great feast of the #Assumption of the Virgin Mary .
For most of us, it is a day that has symbolic and emotional weight far greater than its “purely religious” content.
It is the village .
It is the island .
It’s the festival .
It is the church that fills up .
They are the people who return from far away to be together, even for a while.
And it is perhaps the only major religious celebration that seems, in Greece, to condense today: a very deep emotional and very long-lasting historical Continuity …
Which we experience intensely, but very often completely ignore…
- The story begins, in a strange way, in Ephesus .
The city of Artemis .
Where one of the largest temples of the ancient world stood and where the cult of Artemis had dominated for centuries. The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus was once considered one of the “seven wonders of the ancient world” . It burned down in 356 BC (according to tradition, the day Alexander the Great was born), later rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt many more times – and remained in the ancient world the city dedicated to the cult of Artemis …
Artemis was a virgin goddess .
She was not a mother .
And yet she was associated with childbirth and the protection of women giving birth. According to legend, the daughter of Zeus, she was born to Leto and then immediately helped her mother give birth to her brother Apollo …!
Greek religious thought could, therefore, connect virginity with the protection of motherhood without considering that there is a contradiction.
And about four centuries after the birth of Christianity, in the same city, something happened that would forever change the history of Christian thought :
In 431 AD, the Third Ecumenical Council convened in Ephesus, under Emperor Theodosius II .
The problem was not initially the Virgin Mary.
The problem was Christ himself.
Was Christ one or two? Was he God and Man or God-Man ?
The question was how the two natures of Christ were connected in the same single Person…
Nestorius , Patriarch of Constantinople at the time, objected to the use of the term “Theotokos” for Mary. He and his followers preferred “Christotokos” …
Cyril of Alexandria argued that if we separate God the Word too much from the man Jesus, we risk disrupting the very mystery of the Incarnation .
The Council sided with Cyril .
And so Mary acquired the title that would seal the entire Christian tradition from then on:
#Theotokos !
And the historical paradox is shocking :
Ephesus , the great city of Artemis, became the city where Christianity decisively articulated the special position of the Virgin Mary .
(Incidentally, it is said that in Ephesus Artemis was celebrated on August 15th …)
We don’t need to resort to the easy myth that “the Church replaced Artemis with the Virgin Mary” .
The ancient world had already developed powerful symbols around virginity , female protection , motherhood , and life .
Christianity did not copy them.
He transformed them.
The Virgin Mary is not a “goddess” .
He is a human .
And this is precisely what is shocking about the Christian idea.
The highest human honor is not attributed to a deity who descends into the world.
It is attributed to a person, a woman, who, according to the faith of the Church, becomes the closest human person to God. - Throughout the development of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Person of the Virgin Mary acquired a central role in the cult tradition .
In 626, during the siege of Constantinople by Avar-Slavs – and while the imperial army was far away (fighting the Persians) tradition attributed the salvation of the City to a Miracle of the Most Gracious – which has been praised ever since with: “I Overcome…”
The Virgin Mary is now also becoming a #Warrior_General .
(A few days ago, exactly 1400 years passed since that historical event…)
In the collective memory of Hellenism, the Virgin Mary now brings together symbolisms reminiscent of two ancient female deities:
Artemis , the virgin protector of motherhood,
and Athena , the virgin irresistible general - And we arrive at Athos – the #Holy_Mount .
It is the preeminent place of male monasticism .
And yet this entire world is called: “Orchard of the Virgin Mary” .
Tradition says that the Virgin Mary arrived on Mount Athos with the Apostle John and that she asked her Son to grant her the Mount as her own inheritance.
Of course, it is a tradition of Faith , not a historically proven fact.
And here there is a symbolic paradox worth thinking about.
In the place where no other woman is allowed to enter, the only woman considered to have the absolute right to eternal presence is the Virgin Mary .
Why?
Because monasticism does not see the Virgin Mary as a “female deity” .
He sees her as the quintessential model of a person who said to God: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
Free offer .
Trust .
Humiliation .
Dedication .
And in 963 , Saint Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra .
Although some skete had existed before, it was from that time that the organized, communal form of Mount Athos monasticism essentially began.
In the centuries that followed, Mount Athos became a spiritual center not only of the Greek but of the entire Orthodox world: Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Russians, Romanians, Georgians and other Orthodox peoples coexisted there.
Thus, the “Orchard of the Virgin Mary” became something more than a monastic state.
It became a treasury of memory for an entire Civilization. - And this memory did not remain confined to monasteries.
He passed through the villages .
On the islands .
In families .
On pilgrimages .
In the pictures .
In everyday life .
That’s why August 15th in Greece is more than just a church holiday.
It is one of the few institutions that remained almost untouched through the collapse of empires , the Ottoman Empire , the Revolution , the creation of the modern Greek state, wars and modernity. - The Virgin Mary was always here !
— In 1823 , at the most critical moments of the Revolution, her icon was discovered on Tinos , where it has since become a place of worship for all of Hellenism. It was an icon of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary , attributed to the Evangelist Luke . And the church that was erected there was dedicated to the Annunciation of the “Most Gracious Virgin Mary.”
But along the way, something changed. From a historical event
— August 15, 1940 .
On the day of the great celebration in #Tinos , the Greek cruiser “Elli” was torpedoed by the Italian submarine Delfino .
#August15 , 1940 was thus remembered by Greeks as one of the last moments of peace before the great ordeal.
And since then Tinos has acquired a second, enormous pan-Hellenic significance on August 15th. The Annunciation is still celebrated on March 25th . However, August 15th , after the torpedoing of the “Elli” , acquired an additional, deeply national symbolism on Tinos.
Historical memory transforms religious symbols .
And it deeply embeds them in the collective memory and popular culture …
— Meanwhile, after the #AsiaMinor_Catastrophe of 1922 , the Hellenism of #Pontos saved its central cult-national symbol: the icon of #Virgin_Soumelá .
Which has today become a symbol of reference for Hellenism – especially Asia Minor in Northern Greece… - Let’s come to today.
Really, how much does all this matter in a world that has changed so much?
Big! Maybe bigger than ever ….
Because today it is not only religious Faith that is being questioned.
The very concepts upon which human society was built are often questioned.
Father .
Mother .
Child .
Family .
Gender .
Motherhood …
And there is a systematic effort to convince society that the words “mother” and “father” are simply administrative categories, which can be replaced by the nonsense: “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”
But words are not just boxes on a form.
They carry culture , memory , existential meaning …
They carry an emotion deeply carved into the human – personal and collective – subconscious .
And the word “mother” is not an arbitrary social construct.
It is the word with which man described from the first moment of his existence that from which he was born.
That is why the Virgin Mary is not just “a religious symbol” .
It is, within Greek and Christian history, the supreme expression of an idea:
that motherhood is not a biological detail.
It’s a relationship .
It’s a bond .
It is a responsibility .
It’s an offer .
It is a memory .
It is part of our humanity .
And our emotional state. And our fate…
And maybe that’s why #Christianity did something paradoxical.
He did not symbolize her as a “goddess” (Earth, Rhea, Hera, etc.)
He revealed it in the person of a woman who became the mother of the humanized God .
He did not symbolize her as a “goddess” who “descended” .
But with a human face that “came up” .
Do you believe it or not?
That’s why those who go to demolish the very existence of motherhood are working in vain .
And those who are going to cancel the Faith, the current celebration reminds them of this.
Of the Assumption !
Where motherhood is elevated to the highest human greatness .
And this became irresistible both as an emotion and as a symbol – timeless and cross-cultural .
And then came Greek history, which made the Virgin Mary an integral part of its own memory and its own living heritage .
From the Supreme General to the Great Grace of Tinos to the Virgin Mary Soumela …
While the worship of the Mother of God is common to Orthodox and Catholics and even to some Protestants (Anglicans and Lutherans), especially for Greeks the symbolism is also national …
Believe it or not, all you have to do is enter a church – majestic or a simple chapel – to see her looking at you from above the sanctuary.
So that you understand that when the Greeks decided to revolt, they brought their weapons – or their oath – to be blessed by the Virgin Mary .
This is the Continuation .
Not the ritualistic repetition of the past.
But the transfer of a meaning from generation to generation .
And perhaps this is exactly what we celebrate, without realizing it, every August 15th.
Not just that the Virgin Mary fell asleep .
But that a civilization that learned to look at death without considering it the “end” , that learned to see the body not as an “enemy” , but as a carrier of life, that gave the mother a unique position and kept its memory for centuries from generation to generation – this Civilization remained alive and is not defeated .
And as long as there is still a #child who calls his mother “mother” ,
As long as there is a #grandmother who lights a candle for the Virgin Mary to watch over her grandchildren,
as long as there is a #village or a neighborhood in the cities,
who ascends on August 15th to his church,
History has not yet become a museum .
It won’t happen either.
#HappyVirgin_Day to all of us.
THANASSIS K.
