Mount Pangeo

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The name of Mount Pangeo comes from the word "paggaion", which means the dominant throughout the earth. According to Plutarch, this name was given by the son of Ares and Kritovoulis, who could not bear the remorse of his conscience because he had slept with his daughter, and ended up committing suicide with a sword at the top of the mountain. In the fifth century BC it was called Maketion or Matikio, which came from the Doric word "Mako", which means high. During the Homeric years, it was called Nyssa and later Karmanio. It is a famous mountain that appears in mythology and history, among them by the Oracle of God Dionysus, which is situated on the high mountain peaks. But also for being the place where were the cannibal horses that tamed the demigod Hercules.
Pangeo is known since the mythological years, but also for centuries, for its rich mines that have provided gold and silver in great abundance, and have been a magnet for many peoples and tribes in the vicinity of the Pangea region.
Its first inhabitants were called Derriopes, they wore furs and they lived off fishing and hunting, says Plutarco. Obviously, this form of dress is still present in the Arapides festivities that are celebrated in Monastiraki, Nikissiani, Kali Vrisi, Petrousa and Pyrgos during the weekend of January 6 to 8.
In the text of Herodotus, in reference to the sanctuary of the God Dionysus, there is a parallel with that of the oracle of Delphi, which reveals the reputation and scope of the oracle of Dionysus. At the top of Mount Pangeo was the famous sanctuary of Dionysus, which was under the control of the Satsers. There was a woman in the oracle as "promandis", that is, Pythia. He also had experienced priests, the "prophets", who came from the corps of Rodopi's roe deer, who took his followers to the oracles.
The scenic philosopher Euripides described the sanctuary of the god in Pangea as, hidden in the middle of the cunning human face, there is a visible phalanx, a Bacchus prophet, so that the Panga stone was a modest face of a special god.
Where exactly the oracle of Dionysus is not clearly identified by any source, although it is understood on which of the peaks. In 1930 it was proposed to find the traces of the oracle in Pangeo. In the position of "Askitopripa", when he was looking for the oracle, he only found a few remains of the Neolithic and Roman times. The marble buildings did not exist at that time, the divination was generally a rough construction under an oak, where the wind of the wind moved its leaves, and this sound was seen as a divine message that inspired the fortune-teller.
On Mount Pangeo there are "idiograms" or "rocks" with patterns in granite or limestone, more commonly in the field, but in some cases also in caves. They represent animals, people, wild animals of the forest, but the archaeological knowledge about them is minimal. In the cave paintings of Pangeo there is a drawing of the zodiac. The Lion is one of the designs that are engraved on the rock in a semicircular arrangement and are an ancient zodiac. This zodiac starts from the Gemini and goes to Sagittarius and maybe Capricorn. The Gemini are represented on the rock by two majestic warriors with shields and at right angles to each other. In fact, the Vertical Warrior is ending in a hook-shaped cross, a well-known symbol of the Thracians in the area that symbolized the Sun (Apollo) in antiquity. In 1981, at a conference held in Kavala, organized by the Society of Historical Studies and under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, the anthropologist participated in the cave paintings and concluded that these were made in the region in 500,000 BC.
There is a legend about Orpheus, who at the end of his life disdained the worship of all the gods except the sun, whom he called Apollo. According to Ovid in the book X of the Metamorphoses, Orpheus complaining about the cruelty of the gods, retired to the high Rhodope. One early morning, he ascended Mount Pangeo (where there was an oracle of Dionysus) to greet his god at dawn, but was torn apart by Thracian women for not honoring his previous patron, Dionysus. Other versions of this story are that according to Plato, the gods imposed on Orpheus the punishment of dying at the hands of women for not having had the courage to die for love as Alcestis, daughter of Pelias, who died instead of her husband. Also that Orfeo returned destroyed to his town, where the inhabitants asked him to play his beautiful melodies. Orpheus, depressed as he was, began to hit his lyre with a stone, causing a noise so horrific that everything around him withered; so the people murdered him in order to stop that noise.
Historically, Pisistratus tyrant of Athens, allowed the exploitation of the mines and the colonization of the Hellespont region. Thanks to its policy and the gold of the Pangeo trade grew and the city of Athens was enriched, which led to the erection of many monuments that embellished the city. Attracted by the wealth of its mines was that Philip of Macedonia prepared his expedition, to conquer the neighboring Amphipolis. The good gold management of the mines was one of the mainstays of Macedonia's expansion. Philip coined money and gold was throughout Greece. With gold he bribed politicians, bought the best weapons, recruited the best mercenaries, had all the best to wage war. The work in the mines at that time was very rudimentary and sacrificed, since tools like the present ones were not known. They were illuminated with oil lamps and crawled through the galleries, they had to remove many tons of stones, in order to extract the precious mineral. The work was mostly done by slaves.
  





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