I am in Greece, where so much originates, especially our words. It is because of this shared language that Greece is home to so many parts of our common cultural imagination. At Knossos, you can visit the palace where supposedly Ariadne gave Theseus a string to help guide him out of the deadly labyrinth he ventured into to kill the Minotaur. In a tower above, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, the architect of the palace, were locked up. You know what happened next in the superstructure of myths that live in this place. Theseus slew the Minotaur and returned home, but he flew the wrong sail. His father, Aegeus, leaped into the sea, which took his name. Icarus, to evade checks on departing boats, flew away on waxen wings, but flew too close to the sun.
King Minos may have been a real, individual historical figure, but his name was certainly a term that referred to the Cretan king at Knossos, much like “Caesar” became a general term for a Roman ruler and later turned into “czar.” The Minotaur myth, they think, emerged from the ceremonial use of bull torso costumes the king would wear — combining the name with the Greek “tauros.” I was crestfallen to find no archaeological site of the labyrinth itself, as I prefer to think of the Greek myths as literally true. (Everyone needs something to believe in. They must not have excavated the right spot yet.) The word “labyrinth” also comes from this place. A labrys is a ceremonial double-sided ax that, in the story, the Minotaur wields, and, in history, was used for ritual slaughter. They have one in the museum down the hill (the ax, not a minotaur, sadly).
Greece is now very Christian, and at any gift shop, you can buy beautiful church art, golds overlaying the deep vermilions and blues of the tunic of Christ and his mother, like you would find on an altarpiece. This kind of art is marked for sale in Modern Greek lettering, which is easy to decipher if you know any Cyrillic or Hebrew, as hagiography. This is a word I knew but didn’t know. Some time in high school or college, I must have picked it up in its most common American usage, almost always a way to deride a history book as overly praiseful. Lou Dobbs’s 2020 title The Trump Century: How Our President Changed the Course of History Forever is a work of hagiography, no doubt. But I did not know that this was a metaphor, a word that simply means church art, as in the Hagia Sophia and lithography.
A history writer who would never engage in hagiography, who offends rather than flatters power, might be called an iconoclast. This word comes from the same place as hagiography: church art. The Late Ancient Greek “eikon” means image, and “klan” (conjugated) means to break. In an early Christian controversy that rocked the entire foundation of society, and would do so repeatedly through history, all images in churches (all hagiography) were broken by the original iconoclasts. The smashers believed that depicting things in art was like worshipping a golden calf: It was an affront to the Almighty, a heresy. Most Muslims still do. (Heresy, by the way, is just an Anglicization of the Greek word for to choose, “hairein.” As Salman Rushdie has proven to the world, there are people who do not like other people to be able to choose their own words and thoughts, and this is the word they invented so they don’t have to say so in these terms.)
I like great old mosques even more than I like churches, because in great historical mosques, you will find an accidental tribute to the human spirit. Where representative art isn’t allowed, mosque walls will be decorated with words, looping stone script carvings of Hadith and Koranic verse that are rendered so artfully as to be even more beautiful as pure image, as “eikon,” than art where images are allowed. The human need to create beauty cannot and will not be suppressed. Heresies seep through, thank the gods.
