The Argonautica

The Argonautica is a deeply personal intimate project. It started in the summer of 2012 in Odessa, Ukraine and finished in June, 2018 on in Istanbul, Turkey. I doubt whether this project has ever been finished but I do realize that the actual beginning of the project goes back to my childhood and to one of my most favourite books at that time called The Greek Myths.

If one remembers the Greek mythology well enough, there was one myth called Jason and the Argonauts that does actually tell a true story and If one is to believe the ancient myths, then there was a lot of gold in the land of Colchis.

According to the Roman historian Appian (90-170 A.D.) the myth about the voyage of the Argonauts for the “Golden Fleece” to the Kingdom of Colchis was a real event, and the notion of “Golden Fleece” was associated with the sheepskin technique of gold mining in rivers.
Antique gold washers used sheep’s wool to catch the gold and the tiny gold nuggets would get stuck in the fleece and this is most probably how the myth of the golden fleece was born.
It’s a technique that was described in ancient sources. The fabled wealth of Colchis became known quite early to the Greeks and found symbolic expression in the legend of Medea and the golden fleece.

When I was 34, I and my partner decided to go to Istanbul from Odessa by a cargo ship called Sea Partner, in less than 30 hours we were already walking around Kadikoy on the Asian side of the city. It was here where the huge metropolis had taken its birth, Khalkedon – the city of the blind, where Jason had been told by a blind prophet he assisted how to fool the rocks in the Bosporus straight on his way to the Kingdom of Colchis.