![]() House of Mosaics, main andron, ca 400-430 BCE, Eretria, Greece.Īncient Greek and Latin authors have tried to bring order to the multitude of stories that were told across the shores of Eastern Mediterranean, and they attempted to describe it in an orderly fashion. They make for veritable marine divinities soap opera! Thetis, one of the Neirids, seated on a hippocampus, a hybrid half-fish and half-horse, delivers the spear and the shield of Achilles. The genealogies of the sea gods, goddesses, and monsters form such a tight tangle of relations and connections, of mattings, births, metamorphoses, passion and revenge, that the normal cause-and-effect order of rationalism fails to describe. The ancient Greek seas were inhabited by fish, by ketoi (very large fish), by sea monsters, by gods and goddesses of every caliber, some famous across the Mediterranean (for instance Poseidon) and others of a more regional or local renown! Poseidon, Nereus, Phorcus, Pontus, Proteus, Glaucus, Triton, Ketos, Halios Geron but also Thetis, Amphitrite, Steno, Euryale, Medusa, Ceto, Nereids, Haliadae are just a few of them. The ancient Greeks, the marine pantheon soap operas, the mermen and the hideous sea monsters. In this post, we will touch upon the riddle of the magical creatures of the sea in the Greek and Roman Mediterranean, in ancient Mesopotamia, and in the western Indian Ocean of the Middle Ages. This process gave birth to a panorama of alternative marine beings and to a myriad of theories about them. ![]() The presence of merfolk, their personalities, their way of life, their habits and adventures and their interactions with humans were all ideas developed over time, exchanged between different cultures, adopted and retold a bit differently each time. The book cover in the photograph was painted by Υ.Tsarouchis. The title is inspired by a strange wall painting in the chapel of that village, work of a local naive painter that showed Virgin Mary with a fish tail, blending folk beliefs and the Christian Orthodox faith. ![]() The Mermaid Madonna is a novel by Stratis Myrivilis, set at Skala Sykamias on Lesvos Island, Greece. Fishermen, sailors, and travelers of all sorts are the people who encountered these creatures and who told the stories that reach us today. These are the beings that inhabit both the imaginary and the perceived real world of mariners, of those people who live by the sea or challenge its might to make a living. Some have even survived in our enlightened, rational era and people are still fascinated by them. They inhabited many seas of the world at different points in time! They appear in myths, in religious narratives, in iconography, in scientific works, in early ethnographic accounts, in the occult literature. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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