Αλκυονίδες Μέρες (Halkyon Days)

During these days - usually at the end of January - the weather is mild, sunny with no winds. Hεre is why!

The noun “halcyon” comes from the Greek word “alkyon” (or “halkyon”) meaning the bird called kingfisher. The word and the bird are both connected to a tragic, but romantic Greek myth.

Alcyone (or Halcyone) was the daughter of Aeolus, the ruler of the winds. Alcyone’s beloved husband, Ceyx, the king of Thessaly, drowned in a storm at sea. When she saw his floating body, Ovid tells us in “Book XI” of his METAMORPHOSES, the grief-stricken Alcyone threw herself into the sea “…and then, while beating the light air with wings that instant formed upon her, she flew on, a mourning bird, and skimmed above the waves.” She reached the corpse and tried to embrace it with her wings and kiss it “with her hardened bill.”

The gods, taking pity, turned them both into flying birds. “Their love lived on, nor in these birds were marriage bonds dissolved, and they soon coupled and were parent birds. Each winter during seven full days of calm Halcyone broods on her floating nest — her nest that sails upon a halcyon sea: the passage of the deep is free from storms, throughout those seven full days; and Aeolus restraining harmful winds, within their cave, for his descendants’ sake gives halcyon seas.” The sea and winds were calmed for those seven days as well as the seven after.

Halkyon is also the name of the brightest of the Pleiades, a group of seven stars in the constellation Taurus.