On the morning of January sixth the priest walked to the water.
In the coastal towns the water was the sea. In the river villages it was the river. In the mountain settlements where neither the sea nor a navigable river was within reach it was the village fountain or the cistern or whatever body of water the community maintained as the point of contact between the human settlement and the liquid element whose blessing was the blessing the day required. The body of water mattered less than the act performed at it: the Great Sanctification, the blessing of the waters that was the ritual completion of the twelve days whose cosmological significance the Kallikantzaroi article in this collection develops as the tradition’s most ancient and most persistent encoding of the human fear that the organized world might not hold.
The twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany were the Dodekaimero: the period when Christ had been born but not yet baptized, when the cosmic order had been saved in principle but not yet restored in practice, when the Kallikantzaroi who had been driven from their underground work by the Christmas miracle were loose on the surface because the ritual that would drive them back had not yet been performed. The twelve days table article in this collection develops the foods whose protective symbolism was designed to navigate this cosmological turbulence: the hearth fire that must not go out, the colander on the doorstep, the sacred breads and the fermented grains and the wish-bread cut in silence at the turning of the year.
The Blessing of the Waters was the ritual that ended the turbulence. When the first drop of holy water touched the ground, the Kallikantzaroi were driven back below. The World Tree they had spent a year sawing had completely regenerated. The cosmic boundary that the twelve days had left permeable was sealed. The organized world was restored.
The priest walking to the water on the morning of January sixth was performing the act that completed the cosmological restoration that Christmas had begun. The birth of Christ had healed the World Tree. The baptism of Christ, commemorated on the sixth of January, was the event whose ritual re-enactment in the Great Sanctification provided the sacred substance, the holy water, whose first contact with the ground was the signal to the Kallikantzaroi that their window of freedom was closed.
What the Baptism of Christ Had to Do with the Cosmic Boundary
The theological explanation that the Orthodox Christian tradition gives for the Epiphany celebration is the commemoration of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River by John the Baptist: the event that the Gospels record as the moment of the Holy Trinity’s revelation to humanity, the moment when the dove descended and the voice spoke from the sky and the theological identity of the baptized figure was made visible to the witnesses at the river.
the theological content of the baptism as the Orthodox tradition develops it is the content whose connection to the sanctifying power of water gives the Epiphany blessing its particular character: the immersion of Christ in the Jordan was understood in the patristic tradition as the event that sanctified all water everywhere simultaneously, that transmitted through the contact of the divine body with the element of water the sacred quality whose presence in water then became the condition of water’s subsequent use in the sacramental tradition of the Church.
Water had been blessed before Epiphany in the Christian liturgical tradition. The Great Sanctification of the Epiphany was understood as the blessing of a different order from the ordinary liturgical blessing: the blessing that renewed in each year’s performance the original sanctification of the Jordan’s waters, that restored to the water of whatever body of water the priest blessed on January sixth the sacred quality that the original baptism had established as the permanent property of water as such.
This theological content, the restoration of the original sanctification through the annual ritual performance, is the content whose connection to the pre-Christian tradition of the seasonal ritual renewal of the cosmic boundary is the connection that gives the Epiphany Blessing of the Waters its particular depth as the ritual that the Greek folk tradition understood as the mechanism by which the Kallikantzaroi were driven back below.
The holy water was not simply blessed water in the sense of water over which a prayer had been said. It was water whose sacred quality was the quality of the original sanctification restored in the annual performance, the most completely sanctified available substance in the Orthodox Christian sacramental universe. When this water touched the ground, the sacred quality that it carried was the sacred quality that the forces which the twelve days had released onto the surface could not remain in proximity to. The Kallikantzaroi fled the holy water because the holy water was the concentrated form of the sacred order whose establishment was the condition that the Kallikantzaroi’s existence was permanently opposed to.
The Procession
The Great Sanctification did not begin at the water. It began in the church.
The Divine Liturgy of the Epiphany morning was the liturgical context within which the blessing’s preparation was performed: the prayers and the readings and the ritual gestures that moved the community through the theological content of the day before the community moved physically through the streets from the church to the water.
Then the procession formed.
In the major port cities the procession was the procession of the civic community in its full public expression: the religious authorities in their vestments carrying the icons whose presence marked the procession’s sacred character, the civic authorities in their formal dress whose presence marked the procession’s civic character, the military and naval representatives whose presence marked the procession’s connection to the maritime and military traditions that the blessing of the waters served in the communities whose survival was most directly connected to the sea.
In the smaller coastal villages and the island communities the procession was the procession of the entire available population of the community moving together from the church to the harbor: the fishermen who had decorated their boats with the ornaments of the festive season moving in the procession that would bless the waters their boats moved through, the families whose sons and husbands had spent the autumn and winter months at sea moving in the procession that would bless the waters those sons and husbands had navigated.
The movement of the procession from the church to the water was the spatial enactment of the theological content of the day: the sacred moved from the enclosed sanctuary of the church into the public space of the street and then to the open space of the harbor or the riverbank or the water’s edge, extending the sacred quality of the liturgical space into the space where the blessing was to be performed and where the consequences of the blessing would be most directly felt.
The Cross and the Cold Water
At the water’s edge the priest read the prayers of the Great Sanctification. The liturgical text of the blessing, whose elaborate theological content moved through the creation narrative and the Jordan baptism and the properties of water as the element of purification and of new life, prepared the substance whose first contact with the water would complete the sanctification.
Then the cross entered the water.
In the small village celebrations the priest lowered the cross into the water at the edge of the bank. In the major harbor celebrations the priest threw the cross from the pier or the bridge or in some coastal cities from the deck of a naval vessel into the harbor basin. The cross entered the water and the water received it.
The moment of the cross’s entry into the water was the moment whose consequences the tradition understood as simultaneous and immediate: the water was blessed, the Kallikantzaroi were driven below, the cosmic boundary was sealed, and the organized world was restored for another year.
In the harbor communities where the cross was thrown rather than lowered, young men dove from the pier or the bridge or the quay to retrieve it. The diving was not simply the athletic display that the contemporary reception of the tradition treats it as, though the athletic dimension was real and was celebrated with the enthusiasm of the community for the display of physical courage in cold water in January. It was the embodiment of the theological content of the moment: the willingness to enter the water at the moment of its most complete sanctification was the willingness to be present at the moment of the cosmic restoration, to immerse the body in the sacred substance at the instant when that substance was most fully what it was.
The swimmer who retrieved the cross had been in the water at the moment of the blessing’s completion. He carried the cross back to the surface and back to the priest and back to the waiting community. The tradition’s consistent attribution of good fortune to the cross’s retriever was the recognition that the person who had been in the water at the moment of the Great Sanctification had been in contact with the sacred substance at its moment of maximum sacred intensity.
The Maritime Tradition and the Blessing of the Fleet
the connection between the Epiphany Blessing of the Waters and the Greek maritime tradition is the connection whose depth reflects the character of the Greek relationship to the sea that the collection’s articles on the Aegean name origins and the Poseidon shores and the karavaki tradition all develop from different angles.
The blessing of the waters was not understood by the maritime communities as a general seasonal ritual whose maritime application was incidental to its primary religious content. It was understood as the ritual that blessed the waters through which the boats of the community moved, that extended the sacred protection of the blessed water to the navigational environment whose dangers were the dangers that the community’s survival most directly depended on managing.
The boats in the harbor on Epiphany morning were the boats whose blessing the community’s fishing and trading and island-connecting activity required. The fishermen who had maintained the karavaki through the twelve days, the decorated boats whose lights had illuminated the Dodekaimero’s cosmological turbulence from within the domestic space of the household, now brought their working boats to the harbor for the blessing that the Epiphany provided.
The holy water that the priest sprinkled on the boats and on the harbor and on the sea at the water’s edge was the sacred substance whose presence on the boats was the protection that the maritime community understood as the appropriate beginning of the new year’s navigation. The fisherman who had waited through the twelve days with the karavaki’s lights and the hearth fire and the colander on the doorstep now sent his boat into the blessed water under the sacred protection of the Epiphany’s completed sanctification.
The Ionian island tradition whose character the collection’s articles on Kefalonia and Corfu and Lefkada develop is the tradition where this maritime dimension of the Epiphany blessing is most completely maintained in its contemporary form: the harbor celebrations where the community gathers at the water’s edge, where the boats are decorated and present for the blessing, where the cross is thrown into the harbor water and the divers enter the same harbor water whose blessing has just been completed, constitute the ritual expression of the understanding that the organized world’s restoration on Epiphany morning included the restoration of the maritime order whose maintenance was the condition of the island community’s continued existence.
The Kallikantzaroi Returning Below
When the holy water’s first drops touched the ground, the Kallikantzaroi descended.
the tradition of the Kallikantzaroi’s return below on Epiphany is the tradition whose cosmological content completes the arc that the Kallikantzaroi article in this collection traces from the creatures’ annual near-success in severing the World Tree’s roots through the Christmas miracle that healed the tree and drove the creatures to the surface through the twelve days of their frustrated surface rampage to the Epiphany blessing that drove them back below.
They returned below to find the World Tree completely regenerated. The tree whose roots they had spent eleven months sawing, the axis whose destruction would have ended the organized world, had healed completely in the time they had spent on the surface. The healing had occurred at Christmas. The creatures had not been present to observe it because they had been on the surface. They returned to find the work of eleven months undone.
They picked up their saws. The cycle began again.
the cosmological logic of this cycle is the logic that the Kallikantzaroi article names as the oldest Greek fear expressed in its most persistent folk form: not the fear of the monster that can be fought and defeated but the fear of the foundation giving way beneath the world that is built on it. The response to this fear is not the heroic confrontation but the ritual maintenance of the conditions whose observance keeps the foundation intact: the fire through the twelve nights, the colander on the doorstep, the foods of the Dodekaimero, and at the end of the twelve days, the priest walking to the water and the cross entering the sea and the holy water touching the ground.
The Kallikantzaroi returned below every year. Every year the World Tree was intact. Every year the organized world continued.
Because every year the priest walked to the water.
The House-to-House Blessing and the Scent of Basil
The Great Sanctification at the harbor was the public expression of the Epiphany’s ritual content. The house-to-house blessing was its domestic expression.
In the days following the sixth of January, the priest moved through the community visiting each household with the blessed water and a sprig of basil. The basil was dipped in the holy water and sprinkled through the rooms of the house: the act of extending the Epiphany’s sanctification from the public water into the private domestic space, of sealing the domestic space against the forces that the twelve days had released with the sacred substance whose first drops had already driven those forces back below.
The scent of basil and holy water in the rooms of the house in the first week of January was the sensory marker of the Epiphany’s completion: the smell that the domestic space acquired when the ritual protection of the new year had been extended from the harbor to the household, from the civic to the domestic, from the public water’s blessing to the private rooms’ sanctification.
The priest who performed the house-to-house blessing was the religious authority whose role in the community included the function of extending the sacred order from the sacred space of the church and the sacred moment of the liturgy into the daily life of the community whose organization the sacred order was meant to sustain. The Epiphany house blessing was the annual performance of this function at the moment when the extension of the sacred order’s protection into the domestic space was most urgently required: the first week of January, the first week of the new year, the first week after the cosmological turbulence of the twelve days had been resolved by the Great Sanctification and needed to be sealed at the household level before the ordinary rhythms of the new year’s life could fully resume.
What January Seventh Felt Like
The morning of January seventh was the morning after the cosmic boundary had been sealed.
The Kallikantzaroi were below. The World Tree was intact. The hearth fire that had burned through the twelve nights could now burn with the quality of the fire whose protective function had been successfully performed rather than the fire whose protective function was still urgently required. The colander that had been placed on the doorstep could be returned to the kitchen. The lower jaw of the pig above the door had served its purpose.
The new year had begun.
Not on January first, which the civil calendar marked as the year’s beginning but which the cosmological calendar of the Greek folk tradition understood as a moment in the middle of the Dodekaimero’s turbulence rather than the moment of the year’s actual commencement. The year began on January seventh, after the Great Sanctification had sealed the cosmic boundary and the house-to-house blessing had extended the sanctification to every domestic space in the community and the Kallikantzaroi had returned below and picked up their saws.
the quality of January seventh in the Greek village tradition was the quality of the day whose arrival was felt rather than simply noted: the lightening of the atmosphere that the completion of the twelve days’ ritual requirements produced in the community that had maintained those requirements through the darkness and the cold and the cosmological anxiety of the Dodekaimero.
The fire still burned in the hearth. It would burn through the winter. But it burned differently now. It burned with the warmth of the organized world restored rather than the urgency of the organized world under threat. Hestia’s fire continued. The Kallikantzaroi were below. The World Tree stood.
The year could begin.
At Olympus Estate, Cultural Chronicles traces the practices and institutions that defined Greek civilization from the inside. The twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany were the period when the cosmic order had been saved in principle but not yet restored in practice. The Kallikantzaroi were loose on the surface because the ritual that would drive them back had not yet been performed. When the priest walked to the water on January sixth and the cross entered the sea and the first drops of holy water touched the ground, the Kallikantzaroi descended. They returned below to find the World Tree completely regenerated. The work of eleven months was undone. They picked up their saws. The cycle began again. The house-to-house blessing sealed the sanctification into every domestic space. The scent of basil and holy water in the rooms of the house in the first week of January was the sensory marker of the organized world restored. The year could begin.
