The Greek Plynteria Festival

The city of Athens, Greece, is named for its protectress, the goddess Athena, and at the top of the hill called the Acropolis, there is a great temple in her honor. This temple, the Parthenon, contained a giant statue of Athena, made of ivory and adorned with gold, as a tribute to her magnificence. The residents of Athens took their relationship with their patron deity quite seriously, and every year held a spring festival in her honor, called the Plynteria. The name comes from a Greek word that means “to wash.”

The Plynteria, like many other Greek festivals, spanned two to three days, around May 25^th (fun fact: the Greeks didn’t call it May, it was Thargelion). During this time, temples were closed to the public and no regular business was conducted.  Instead, statues were stripped of their adornments and underwent a ritual cleaning. The statue of Athena at the Parthenon is estimated to have been around forty feet high, so as you can imagine, cleaning it was hardly a simple process. In the temple of Athena, only women performed this ceremonial task, and the statue was hidden from view during the cleaning, typically behind a large cloth.

In some of the smaller temples and sanctuaries that also honored Athena, statues were often physically moved for cleansing.  Many of the women known as the Praxiergidai took smaller statues of the goddess to the sea in a ceremonial procession, to wash it amidst the waves. Further inland, she would have been carried to local rivers, or other bodies of running water. These smaller statues would likely have been carved of wood–probably olive–and decorated with a robe (the peplos) and jewelry which were removed during the Plynteria, and also ritually cleaned.

Plutarch describes the festival in his writings, saying,

“The Praxiergidae celebrate these rites on the twenty-fifth day of Thargelion, in strict secrecy, removing the robes of the goddess and covering up her images. Wherefore the Athenians regard this day as the unluckiest of all days for business of any sort.”

Essentially, the Plynteria was a quick break for Athena from protecting the city–because everything was on hold for those few short days, and the city was without its patroness, no urgent business was conducted. It was a given that anything done while Athena was busy being washed was destined to fail, so no one bothered with anything of importance.

It appears that the fig played a role in this celebration as well. The processionals to the sea were apparently led by a young woman carrying a basket of fig pastries. Other sources indicate that dried figs were consumed in great abundance during this period of celebration. The fig is actually important in Greek legend, as it was the first fruit to be deliberately cultivated among early communities, and is connected to the role and status of Athens, and other city-states of the time, in Greek history.

Finally, there is some documentation that Athena was given a sheep at the end of the Plynteria festival. A sheep would have been considered a minor sacrifice, as opposed to a cow or a bull, for instance.

If you’d like to mark the Plynteria yourself, as part of your spring rituals during the Beltane season, you can include some of these in your celebrations:

• Symbols of Athena, such as owls, olives, shields and staffs
• A bowl of dried figs
• Baked fig cakes
• Ritual cleansing of statues and altar tools