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During the Roman Empire, from 13 to 15 February, Lupercalia was celebrated in honour of the god Faunus (the Pan of the Greeks). The Romans sacrificed goats and dogs, while young boys would beat young girls with strips of goatskin to impart fertility to them. A similar celebration existed in Ancient Athens in the month of Gamilion (corresponding to the second fortnight of January and the first of February), the Theogamia, in honour of Zeus and Hera.
The celebration was abolished by the Church in the 5th century AD, as pagan. In its place (February 14) was the celebration of the feast of Saint Valentine, a martyr of the Christian faith from Rome, by decree of Pope Gelasius. Valentine, according to legend, was a 3rd-century priest who, in defiance of imperial orders, agreed to marry young lovers in love, thus sparing men from military service. In other words, he was a true protector of lovers and conscientious objectors, we would say today! Another legend says that while Valentine was in prison, refusing to renounce his faith, he fell in love with the blind daughter of his jailer, to whom he even sent a letter signed: 'With love from your Valentine.
Saint Valentine
The meaning that the celebration of Saint Valentine has today acquired in the late Middle Ages, around the 14th century. The first written reference is in 1382 in the poem Parlement of Foules by the father of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer. The poem of 699 lines is a lullaby inspired by the tradition that every year on Valentine's Day the birds gather before the goddess of nature to choose their mates ('for this was Saint Valentines Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate').
In the early 17th century, Valentine's Day as the Feast of Lovers must have been quite well known in England, if we take into account the relevant reference in Shakespeare's Hamlet (Song of Ophelia from Act 4, translated by Constantine Hatzopoulos, 1916):
Good morning! It's a sycophant. I'm celebrating St. Valentine's Day and I came here, daughter, to your window to see if I would be your mate.
In 1840 it was commonplace for lovers to exchange small handwritten notes of greetings (valentines). At the same time the celebration spread to America, where the exchange of greeting cards was helped by industrialization and cheap postage. Over time, the business acumen and cultural imposition of the Anglo-Saxons gave the holiday the universal character we know today.
In recent years, the commercialization of the holiday has reached an all-time high. After cards, e-cards, flowers and chocolates, it is now the turn of the jewellery industry to appropriate the day of lovers. The turnover of Valentine's Day in the United States alone exceeded $15 billion in 2010, the equivalent of Botswana's GDP.
Valentine's Day is causing a reaction in the non-Christian world. In India, fanatical Hindus and Muslims oppose the celebration. They consider it a cultural plague and a product of globalization. In Pakistan, the local Islamic party is calling for its abolition, as it claims it goes against Islamic culture. The same view is held by conservative circles in theocratic Iran.
The Greek version of the Festival of Lovers
Saint Valentine is not mentioned anywhere in the Orthodox calendar and, naturally, the Orthodox Church has never acknowledged him. "This saint is for us non-existent. He is a fiction of Western origin," say people in the Church. In turn, the Catholic Church in its revision of its general calendar in 1969 relegated Valentine's Day to a local feast because it knew almost nothing about his life, except that he was buried in Via Flaminia, Rome, on February 14.
When, however, the foreign saint began to enter the life of the Greeks for good and this day became established in our country as the day of lovers in the late 1970s on the initiative of florists, representatives of the Church suggested that Greek lovers should honour and celebrate the saints in the Orthodox calendar.
In 1994, the then press spokesman of the Holy Synod, Yannis Hadjifotis, proposed that the feast of Saint Hyacinth, celebrated on 3 July, be established as the day of lovers. Hyacinth was a native of Caesarea in Cappadocia and served as a quibiculus (boatman) for the Roman Emperor Trajan. A man trusted by the emperor, Hyacinth converted to Christianity, incurring the wrath of Trajan, who, upon learning of this, ordered him to be imprisoned without being given any food unless he wanted to eat idol food. Thus Hyacinth passed forty days without touching the idols. On the 41st, however, he surrendered his spirit to the Lord, at the age of 20.
The establishment of July 3 as a day of love and poetry was pioneered by the well-known songwriter from Anogia in Crete, Louis of Anogia, who, together with men of spirit and letters, proceeded to build a temple in a beautiful location at an altitude of 1,200 meters on Psiloritis. In front of this chapel, which is the only one in Greece dedicated to the Saint, events called Yakinthia take place every summer.
In 2000, the late Archbishop Christodoulos, in his effort to bring the youth closer to the Church, proposed that the Feast of Lovers be celebrated on 13 February, the day on which Orthodoxy commemorates the memory of the Apostles Aquila and Priscilla, a virtuous couple of Jewish tentmakers who lived in Corinth and converted to Christianity.
There is a third suggestion, probably from ancient scholars, to celebrate Odysseus and his faithful Penelope as patrons of lovers on February 14.
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