Ο Μυστικός Σποριάς

Villagers in Lympia are angry. They are angry that someone has desecrated the local cemetery by planting wheat at its edge. Lympia is located about 12 miles south of Nicosia in the Greek part of Cyprus. The wheat was planted about 50 meters away from the gravesites, which were not disturbed.

“He must be from around here, and we need to find him at all costs because it’s disrespectful to the dead,” declared Mihalakis Christodoulou, the head of the local council. “I personally will not let it drop,” he continued. “Sooner or later we’ll discover who he is.”

Personally, I don’t really understand why the locals are so upset. First of all, does planting wheat really constitute vandalism or desecration? Dare I say that Lympia’s mystery sower has created what could easily be considered public art? Moreover, I find the wheat to be wonderfully symbolic. It makes a powerful theological statement.

To early Christian communities, wheat symbolized resurrection. The author of the Gospel of John has Jesus saying,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24).

Similarly, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul uses wheat to illustrate the resurrection body:

And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain (1 Corinthians 15:37).

Even if they’ve never read the Bible, the people of Lympia should be familiar with the use of wheat as a symbol of resurrection. For centuries, Greeks have prepared a dish called κόλυβα (kolyva), which consists of boiled wheat mixed with pomegranate seeds and is eaten after both a funeral and the 40-day memorial or μνημόσυνο (mnimosyno). Like the wheat, the pomegranate seeds serve as a culinary metaphor for the impotence of death in Greek cosmology by evoking the story of Persephone, who, even though she had eaten four of the seeds during her stay in the underworld after being abducted by Hades, was resurrected and returned to her grief-stricken mother, Demeter.

I think it would be nice if every cemetery were surrounded by a field of wheat.

The title of this post, Ο Μυστικός Σποριάς (O Mystikos Sporias) means “The Secret Sower,” though it is from the Greek word μυστικός meaning “secret” that the word “mystical” derives, so this post might also be called “The Mystical Sower.”

The image is Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies (1890, oil on canvas, Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) painted by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) the year he died.