22d • General discussion
🌙 Wisdom Wednesday: Frangissa, The Sanctuary That Forgot Where It Was
This last week Apollo came home to Delphi at the solstice. As a Hekatean witch, I honor this solar wheel. And, this week Apollo surfaces somewhere far stranger. Out of the ground itself, on Cyprus, after vanishing for 140 years.
In 1885, a German archaeologist named Max Ohnefalsch-Richter stumbled onto fragments of statues in a narrow valley near the ancient royal city of Tamassos, in the area of modern Pera Oreinis. He dug. He found a rural sanctuary of Apollo packed with votive offerings — including dozens of stone bases that once held statues, left standing exactly where the ancients had placed them. Then he documented it only briefly, backfilled the site, and moved on. And the location was lost. Not metaphorically lost — actually lost. For over a century no one could say with certainty where Apollo's sanctuary at Frangissa physically was. So maddening.
It took archive work across German, English, and Canadian collections, plus drone surveys and a 3D model of the valley, to relocate it around 2020. Since then, teams have been excavating. And the fifth season — reported this spring — produced what they're calling possibly the most spectacular results yet: more than 20 votive statue bases still standing in their original positions, untouched since antiquity.
Here is the part that stops me. Several of those limestone bases still hold the feet of the statues that once stood on them. Stone feet. Terracotta feet. Fragments of clay figurines. The worshippers are gone, the gods' images are mostly gone — but the place where they stood to be seen by Apollo is still there, foot by foot, base by base. The dig also turned up the first undisturbed Archaic pottery from the site, finally giving hard proof of how early the worship began (7th–6th century BCE, the Archaic period).
And the offerings tell a story about accumulation — about a sanctuary running out of room for devotion. In places the bases were stacked so tightly that older ones were deliberately buried under leveling fill, a flat new floor laid down, and a fresh layer of offerings installed on top. Centuries of people saying here, take this, remember me until the holy ground had to be re-floored to hold more.
That's the image I want you to carry into the Descent this week. Frangissa is a place that was buried — on purpose, in layers, by the very people who loved it — and then forgotten, and then found again with the feet still standing. Phase II asks where the light goes when it goes down. Here's one answer: it goes into the ground, it gets covered over, the location of it slips out of memory entirely — and it is still there, intact, waiting for someone with the patience to relocate the valley. Nothing devotional is ever really lost. It's just under fill, waiting for the season you're ready to dig.
👇 What in your life got buried in layers — not lost, just covered over — that this descent might be asking you to relocate? Stone feet still standing where you left them. I'll go first.
En Erebos, Phos. In darkness, light.
Blessings, Tirza 🌿🗝️🌙
#WisdomWednesday #HekateanHealing #Archaeology
📚 Further reading: Dario Radley, "Archaeologists uncover rare 2,500-year-old votive statue bases at lost Apollo sanctuary in Cyprus," Archaeology Magazine (June 2026) — https://archaeologymag.com/2026/06/statue-bases-at-lost-apollo-sanctuary-in-cyprus/ | AMRICHA Foundation, "Pera-Frangissa: A sanctuary of Apollo in the area of ancient Tamassos" (project page, Season 2025 report) — https://www.amricha.com/en/research-and-publications/pera-frangissa/ | Pausanias, Description of Greece (for Cypriot Apollo cult context)
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🌙 Wisdom Wednesday: Frangissa, The Sanctuary That Forgot Where It Was
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