Agean Tale: Artemis makes the Holly Tree
A hike along the Aegean invariably involves an encounter with the spines of the Holly Oak. Here's the prickly shrub's origin story as I imagine it.
Gods and goddesses have been worshiped along the Aegean as long as humans have settled here. But there is one goddess whose existence predates the settlement of human worshippers. Before the first settlers straggled over the Boz Mountains, before the first keels kissed the sandy beaches, Artemis was here, caring for the mothers and newborns of the land.
In this time before time, mother animals lived in a state of constant heartbreak. Ravenous predators infested the land. Gulleys along the coast teemed with dens of jackals and foxes, while lions, leopards, and wolves ruled the wooded uplands.
A mother hare with her litter of kits, the graceful doe with her shy fawn, even the lioness with her rowdy cubs, all lived in fear that their newborns would be devoured.
Far too often, the hillsides echoed with pleas of mourning mothers, and — as it happened — those wails fell upon the ears of Artemis, Protector of Mothers and Infants in all of nature’s realms.
To protect these newborns, Artemis created the holly oak, a shrub with thick, bristly leaves. She decreed that wherever the afterbirth of a newborn touched the ground, there a holly oak would grow, providing shelter for newborns whenever mothers left to seek nourishment.
The solution was, well, divine. Doves and warblers found protection among the bristly leaves and nested in the holly. They scattered and chattered warnings whenever danger approached, alerting the mother whose infants huddled close to the trunk of the shrub.
And whenever a fox crept up to steal a newborn kit, the barbed leaves poked at its eyes. A dark, gray wolf barked in pain the first time its soft nose scraped the bristly leaves. A great lion roared and swatted at the branches, hoping to scare out a timid fawn for its breakfast, but he limped away, a hundred painful spines embedded in his paws.
In autumn acorns fell in a ring around each tree, gobbled up by the deer, mice, and rabbits. Hillsides along the Aegean soon cooed with the sounds of contented children and happy mothers
To this day, a walk along an Aegean hillside brings many encounters with holly oaks: painful for unprepared hikers, but enduring reminders of Artemis, the region’s most beloved and longest-loved goddess.
Don’t get too close. Every one of them marks the site of a live birth. Many still shelter the Aegean’s tiniest and most vulnerable young creatures. And Artemis, forgotten today by most human inhabitants of the Turkish Coast, still cares for them.
More of my Aegean Tales
Echo & Narcissus (January 2024)
Achilles in Colophon (September 2023)