From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The day before visiting the Museum of Cycladic Art, I climbed the Acropolis. The late January light was lively, the air filled with low conversation and the faint tap tap of archaeological work happening somewhere out of sight. Athens is a city that rewards a high vantage point, its endless tumble of buildings framed by yellow wildflowers, diggers, scaffolding or, on nearby Mount Lycabettus, prickly pear leaves scored with names and dates and expressions of love, the path a living monument to its past visitors.
As I moved towards the caryatids that hold up the south porch of the Erechtheion, a man stumbled on the marble in front of me. Patches of it peep through the concrete walkways like exposed bone, polished to slippery perfection by millions of feet. He somersaulted forward, falling with the same dull thud as the oranges I’d seen dropping from the trees on the streets below, finally coming to rest on his forehead. A crowd rushed in; his glasses retrieved, strangers’ hands placed reassuringly on each shoulder. Soon the only sign of his misadventure was the smear of blood left behind, bright against the pale stone.
Installation view of ‘Kykladitisses: Untold Stories of Women in the Cyclades’ at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. Photo: Paris Tavitian; © Museum of Cycladic Art
This moment returned to me the following morning while making my way around ‘Kykladitisses: Untold Stories of Women in the Cyclades’ at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (until 4 May). The exhibition is staged in partnership with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades and aims to ‘[shed] light on [women’s] lives and their role in the societies of the islands of the archipelago from the Neolithic period until the 19th century’. The Cycladic archipelago includes Andros, Ios, Kea, Mykonos, Milos, Naxos, Paros, Santorini, Sifnos, Syros and Delos, the latter the mythic birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. Its artistic traditions stretch back past classical antiquity and the Minoans, to the prehistoric.
The exhibition includes more than 180 artefacts from a mixture of private and public institutions. These serve to illustrate the restrictions and rigid social roles, as well as the pockets of power, that shaped life on these islands over several millennia.
The 12 themed sections are largely what one might expect, covering sex, death, violence, marriage, mythology, fertility and gender variance, with detailed explorations of domestic space (the household, the oikos, is revealed to be both prison and private kingdom) and religion. The exhibition is careful to balance out the totalising reality of patriarchy – never a surprise, but still staggering to contemplate – with more nuanced examinations of the agency of women, whether managing family finances or enjoying greater participation in public as priestesses or via rites such as the Thesmophoria, an all-female festival dedicated to Demeter and Persephone.
Inevitably, given both the profusion of stuff and the span of geography and time covered (it’s easy to see everything BC as equally ancient, and therefore helpful to remember when staring at two objects from 2000 BC and 450 BC that this is roughly equivalent to the period between now and the fall of the Roman Empire), visitors must orient themselves by a couple of key pieces or personal preoccupations. An obvious landmark is an astonishing fresco from Santorini dated c. 1600 BC, where another injury on the rocks is charged with great significance.
The fresco depicts a trio of proto-Cocteau women in flat profile, all strong of eyebrow with sharp little noses. One, breast bared, proffers a string of beads. Another’s shaven blue head indicates her youth. Between them, the third woman kneels. She has cut her foot while picking saffron crocuses, staining the stones behind her. From another droplet on the ground, hardly visible, a fresh flower grows.
The fresco was preserved when a volcano exploded on Thera, as Santorini was then known, some 3,600 years ago, burying the town of Akrotiri under a thick layer of ash. Such eruptions tend to be very bad for those living through them, and very useful for those tasked with unearthing the past – though here, unlike Pompeii, the island’s inhabitants had enough forewarning to flee.
A Minoan fresco from c. 1600 BC found at Xeste 3 in Akrotiri on Thera, depicting women harvesting saffron. Photo: Paris Tavitian; © Museum of Cycladic Art
But for those excavators clutching their bones and jewels and pottery shards, the deep past remains a place of shadows: pieced together through hints and interpretive leaps. Sometimes blood is just blood. But here, given the anti-inflammatory effects of the saffron crocus, the implied age of the youngest woman, and the fresco’s presence in a building known as Xeste 3, which seems to have been used for public rituals, the entire scene potentially reads as an elaborate metaphor for the onset of menstruation.
Elsewhere in the exhibition one finds a series of nippled ewers. A number were also discovered at Akrotiri – some in the same building, decorative blood trickling from their pinched areolas – and several Cycladic statues from the late Neolithic period: those gorgeous, eerie figures with their alien heads, crossed arms and pubic indents, their stance at once dislocating and deeply familiar. (Roberta Smith likens them to mothers shivering on the beach as they wait for their children, while they always put me in mind of a woman hovering anxiously at the edge of a party.) Some of the statues have scores across their stomachs, suggesting post-partum stretch marks. No one knows why they were made, whether they were fertility idols, grave offerings, toys or all – or none – of the above.
It feels predictable, even passé, to focus so closely on these most bodily works; too redolent of second-wave feminism or, worse, the ubiquitous Urban Outfitters boob vase of the late 2010s. But the vitality and sheer weirdness of such pieces is indisputably thrilling. It is easy to suggest we like such artefacts because they represent continuity, a reminder that bleeding and sex and breastfeeding and birth have been going on forever, or even a promise that we possess some ancestral, universal tie to these women living however many millennia ago out in the Aegean.
It is their unknowability that makes them properly special though, the dance between mystery and recognition that so many of these objects embody. The exhibition aims to let these artefacts speak for themselves, to demonstrate by way of statues and steles, everyday possessions and elaborate artworks, the wide spectrum of women’s experience on these islands, but the language that emerges is often oblique, all the better for it.
‘Kykladitisses: Untold stories of women in the Cyclades’ is at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, until 4 May.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.