Ceremony of Reciprocity and Solidarity of the Flax

Dear friends,
dear friends and fellow travelers,

The ceremony of Reciprocity and Justice of Linari , a ceremony that is lost in the depths of time, between myth and woman, past and present, was held with emotion this year, on Tuesday, June 21, 2022, at the dawn of the summer solstice, at the top of Psiloritis, at the headquarters of the University of the Mountains, in Rethymno.

The entire team of the Penelope Gandhi Mission, teachers of all levels from all over Greece and students from Crete, who sowed and harvested the Flaxseed, participated in the ceremony.

Sowing, cultivation, harvesting, the ceremony of gratitude to God and nature, automatically awaken our inseparable relationship with the earth, primordial knowledge, the creation of truth, germination, fruition, the ripening of the fruit and the creation of thread.

Our Mission, resisting the corrupting reality of imitation and the uniformity of the times, quietly implements the goals set by the University of the Mountains 20 years ago, to this day.

Every day, he teaches the ethics of weaving, the great value of the sacred Thread and the Weaving art of Crete to the new generation, in schools, with the valuable help of our weavers.

These ancient, indomitable and illiterate women held firmly in their hands the sacred thread of Crete and the entire oral culture and handed it over to our own hands.

Those women left, but they did not become dust.
They became birds, trees, air, purple thread and they bound our souls.
They became ideas and passions and they define our will and actions in the century…

The Penelope Gandhi Mission team quietly organizes weaving workshops throughout Greece. It cultivates and produces natural yarns, dyed with plants and flowers of Crete, with the aim of creating small-scale, climate-friendly handicrafts of great cultural value.

It is encouraging and gratifying that our Mission created the first beginning, became the inspiration for many young and creative women to begin weaving history again, in villages and cities, with great enthusiasm and grace.

With honor

Varvara Terzakis Pallikaris