Looking for love in very old places, Part Two

BY ED FELIEN AND CAROL HOGARD

Carol standing next to a "Cycladic Goddess" statue

We landed in Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, and spent a couple of days wandering through museums, looking at sculptures and figurines, but we were anxious to see something real, something on site, in situ (as archeologists say), that had been part of the life of the pre-Nuraghic or Ozieri culture.

We went to a small town on the southeast coast, Villasimius, where there was supposed to be a good example of a domus de janas. Domus de janas was what locals called these little structures. The term means fairy houses. There is something whimsical about them. The one we found by the sea in Villasimius looked like a stone igloo, with a narrow passageway leading to a bigger room. Of course, if you’re looking for inferences to the great mother goddess culture, then the structure could also remind you of the female reproductive anatomy, with a vaginal canal leading to a large womb, and the womb would have been the final resting place for the woman to be buried. There were two large flat stones guarding the entrance that could have been placed in front to keep out small animals while the body decomposed. The structure was quite small, but four thousand years ago people were quite a bit smaller.

We drove to the spot on the map, found a parking lot. At one corner there was a sign describing the domus de janas and path off to the right leading down by the sea. We followed the path. It went on and on for about half a mile over the rocky coast. On our travel we found a stone that looked like it had been rough hewn out of the rock into the head of a Cycladic goddess. Later I showed a picture of the stone to one of the people at the local museum. He was unconvinced. He said there was a very good likeness of a dolphin in the same bay that had been carved by the actions of the tide. Perhaps I was seeing too much history in the accidents of geology, but the angle of the face, the seeming likeness of an eye at just the right place and the general shape of the monument suggested a Cycladic reference. We know there was a lot of trade between the Greek islands and Sardinia. Sardinia had vast deposits of obsidian—a volcanic glass that was commonly used for tools and weapon points for hunting—and we find Sardinian obsidian from Cyprus to Crete and throughout the Cycladic Islands. And this figure seems to be standing in a way that her face could be used as an altar or lectern for someone facing the direction of the Greek islands.

We continued our march along the sea in search of the domus de janas until we came up to a small village. It turned out to be a compound of time-share condos for German tourists. We asked a woman if she knew where the domus de janas was. She had never heard of it. But her children, standing near her, said they thought what we were looking for was just down the road. We went down the road and, sure enough, nestled into the side of a hill, there it was. There was no sign, no gate or restrictions on entrance. A relic from an ancient past, four thousand years ago, the last monument to that civilization in this area, and here it was, exposed and vulnerable, subject to the casual kindness of children.

In overprotective America, the monument would have been shrouded in a plastic dome and no one would have been allowed to touch it. Of course, the next step would have been to turn it into a theme park and have Mickey Mouse greeting visitors.

We were faced with no such limitations. With some measure of reverence we crawled inside, one at a time. It was cramped but then we weren’t dead ancient Sardinians. It felt good to measure the sense of proportion that our ancestors used to honor someone or, possibly, many someones over the years.

There is no good reason to believe that men weren’t buried in these tombs as well as women, but we have found no evidence of that. We have found with most of the women a figurine, like a doll, carved in stone. These figurines were more than a symbol of their ability to give life, they were their familiar, their protector.

When the Dorians swept through around 1600 BC, the role of women in Sardinia (and in the world) changed. Women and the marvelous mystery of life were no longer the center of cultural life; war was now the central organizing reality.

Carol sitting at the entrance to a domus de janas burial site

Before, the Sardinians had lived in grass huts in loose communal settings, now they lived in fortresses. Figurines of men appear now for the first time, and they are almost always portrayed with weapons. The Dorians came and took over the lowlands to graze their cattle and sheep and drove the native Sardinians into the hills. Most of the Sardinian settlements begin now to take on the shape of medieval castles—a defensive structure with crenellated roofs to allow them to throw spears down upon an invading enemy. The structures were sometimes large enough to hold a small town.

How did this change the role of women in Sardinia?

The ancient myth of the Rape of the Sabine Women is considered one of the founding myths of the beginning of Roman history: Romulus’ men had no wives, so they invited some neighboring tribes to a party and, at a given signal from Romulus, they abducted the Sabine women. Although just a myth, it has endured as the founding rationale for the beginning of the Roman Empire. It seems likely that something like that happened in Sardinia in 1600 BC.

The role of women changed from being the central focus of life-giving energy for the community to becoming the property and chattel of men who were devoted to a sky god, a patriarchal social structure and a warrior cult.

The accommodation Sardinian women have made since the Dorian invasion, the rape of the Sabine women, the wary truce, the assimilation, the dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—where one thing ultimately turns into its opposite. Are traces of the original Sardinian women still here?

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot: Let us ask WHO is it. Let us go and make our visit.
One of the waiters at the hotel where we stayed was Luchia. She was saucy and tough, ironic with an iron edge. D. H. Lawrence must have met her almost 100 years ago. He describes her perfectly in “Sea and Sardinia:” “It takes some time to get used to this cocky, assertive behavior of the young damsels, the who’ll-tread-on-the-tail-of-my-skirt bearing of the hussies. But it is partly a sort of crude defensiveness and shyness, partly it is barbaric mefiance or mistrust, and partly, without doubt, it is a tradition with Sardinian women that they must hold their own and be ready to hit first.”