The Discovery of the White Crystal

The White Rod

It is a quiet summer afternoon at the ‘Waters of St Barbara’ at the city of Drama, Northern Greece, 1979. Quiet is everywhere with the only sounds being some vanishing chirping of birds and croaks of frogs. The ducks of the lake are slowly retreating towards their nests for the night. After a hot twelve-hour blast, nature prepares to welcome the redeeming night that will cool and refresh it. As the day wanes, everything becomes calm and tranquil. It is the time for the young couples to come to the green, watery oasis of the ‘Waters of St Barbara’, for their daily, usually unscheduled and unarranged date. Even loners frequent the place hoping to find their match. It the spot of the young and of love encounters.

A young couple in love, Anna and Adonis, walk hand-in-hand, enjoying their afternoon stroll through the lush oasis created by the waters of St Barbara, in the city of Drama. Anna is a very sweet, tender and beautiful girl,with all her lithe moves strongly reminiscent of an amazon, or in other words, what we would today call tomboy, but with overflowing coquettish femininity far beyond the usual. But her most significant feature was her assertiveness and freedom of speech. She would always be the supporter of someone mistreated in her social surroundings. In that she shared a common thread with Adonis, a particularly sensitive and rather reserved, romantic boy in his early twenties, who was looking at the world with simple, well-meaning and kind eyes. He considered everyone a friend. Evil people simply did not exist for him. There were only people who did something wrong and who would quickly see the error of their ways and correct them. If one happened on him by chance, he would catch him staring into the distance with his mind lost in his dreamland. He was constantly dreaming of a world good and ideal, where people love and help one another, where children play and laugh while adults are joyful and happy. He was dreaming of a beautiful human society where the elderly would be respected by the younger generations. Whoever and whenever someone needed his help, he would gladly rush to offer it selflessly to his fellow. That was all the more the case for his friends. He lived too much in a fairyland that would take him too long to exit from, if he kept on treating people with overdue naivety and kindness. As a result, he often became the victim of his immediate environment. Fortunately, he had good friends, such as Kostas, Papagiotis and Kosmas who stood up for him during hard times. Yet, his true support was Anna.

As they were strolling through the wonderful cool scenery, they met their close friends, Kosmas Amarantides and his girlfriend, Areti, who were lying on the grass, speaking softly. Kosmas was the dare of the gang and a well-known prank, the first to jump to a dance when he got the chance. He misses no chance of course to tease Anna and Adonis a bit. They respond amicably, talk with them a bit and then they part, greeting each other to continue with their walk. While walking away, Kosmas shouted to Anna and Adonis that he had met their common friend, Panagiotis Vasiliadis at Eleftheria Square and that he was looking for him for a reason that he did not reveal. It seemed however that the issue was something urgent and important. Adonis gestured to Kosma that he knows about the issue and that he will take care of it. It was something between Panagiotis and Adonis.

So, Anna and Adonis walked a bit further and stopped under the canopy of a great century-old plane tree. There is a small rocky waterfall opposite them, whose cascading waters created a pleasant roar and soapy white foam on its bottom. They are amidst scenery of fantastic beauty surrounded by lush vegetation, huge plane trees, wildflowers with lots of ducks and fish splashing in the rich waters that quieted down after a while. They sit at the root of the century-old tree, with their backs against the more than a meter-wide trunk and are enjoying their love. They gaze at the cascade of the small fall opposite them that mesmerizes them as the water hits the ground powerfully from the height of two meters. The small fall is surrounded by rock and stone that fits in the general scenery as a natural extension of the ecological system, providing an outlet to the waters of a small artificial pool at the bottom of which, legend has it, an old Christian church self-submerged when the city was taken by the Ottoman Turks.

The waters of the fall formed foamy eddies, sending forth water droplets as they cascaded. The stony wall, the waterfall, the cascading water and the lush vegetation, all created a calm beauty that soothed the soul and thought while at the same time ‘controlling’ it and keeping it in touch with its splashing. The young couple in love tied in harmonically with the surrounding beauty. They were a beautifully real picture amidst a beautifully complex scenery. The eyes of the couple followed the flow of the water coming down from the artificial lake. According to legend, an old small chu