Bed time story
It is almost midnight and I should probably have been sleeping by now. As from tomorrow begins the most anticipated and at the same time, the most challenging period of my farming life. The olives harvest and the olive oil extraction. I hope I'll have the chance to share some snapshots of our daily life at the olive grove, although my experience tells my that I'll probably be too tired to do so :)
Anyway that's for the immediate future. For now I have for you a Greek myth that I originally wrote here, but nobody seemed to have read it!
Maybe tonight you will read it and if you don't like myths you can think of it as a bed time story!
Ancient Greeks worshiped twelve gods and among them Zeus was the most powerful one and a notorious womanizer. Europa was a young and lighthearted Phoenician princess, spending her time with the company of her maidens.
When Zeus saw beautiful Europa playing by the sea, overwhelmed by lust, he transformed into an amazingly fragrant white bull and appeared in front of her. He approached very gently and tricked her to climb on his back. Once the girl overcome her natural fear of the huge animal, the bull rushed over the sea and carried her to the island of Crete.
There he took his human form and made love with Europa under a plane tree. The young woman stayed in Crete and gave birth to three sons before Zeus leave her and move on, for new adventures!
But the king of Crete took Europa to be his wife and raised the boys as his sons. The older boy, Minos, inherited his kingdom and become the most famous and powerful king of Crete and the founder of the Minoan Civilization.
That is the myth that gave it’s name to the continent of Europe and the inspiration for a 4 meters in height and about 6 tons in weight brass statue that you can see if you visit the town of Agios Nikolaos on the east side of the island of Crete in Greece. A second statue made by the same Cretan artists is in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. This pair of sculptures is meant to symbolize the unity of the European civilization.
The small detail that caught my eye is that people are touching the toes of the statue, I imagine for good luck although I was under the impression that there are other statues with that gift :)
Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.
Commenting, upvoting and resteeming are highly appreciated!
haha! I followed the link to your previous post before I read this one. I do that.
Anyway, I love this. Short, highly informative, well-written, and interesting with an especially intriguing tid-bit at the end. Fabulous photos. I'll be reading more of you. Thanks.
Thank you very much @owasco for your uplifting comment!
It really means a lot to me. You see it is less than two years that I write in English (since I joined steemit) and I am still quite insecure about my writing skills.
I love myths and loved reading this one Stef. Your images, revealing different angles of the statue as the story unfolded are wonderful. Who would have guessed that the toes were golden ~ Made me look at the photographs all over again ~ And again. Beautiful.
Hope your harvest and the olive oil extraction goes well. ♥︎♥︎⚖️♥︎♥︎
Thank you @allyinspirit for your support and encouragement!
And for resteeming my post :)
Much appreciated!
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Stef, I don't know how I missed it the first time. This is great! How you told the stories with the pictures was wonderful. It was fun to learn the story too!
Thank you Sara!
Ancient Greeks made up a lot of stories, maybe I should elaborate on that!