Dog Sacrifice in Ancient and Modern Greece: From the Sacrifice Ritual to Dog Torture (kynomartyrion)

Abstract

The article presents and discusses the custom of kynomartyrion (dog torture) which took place in the Greek lands until the 1980s. In many areas it stopped in the 1930s because of its cruelty. The author begins his discussion with the presentation of some elements that are related to the dog. More specifically, the dog is an animal that entered the humanized environment long ago and belongs to the creatures whose nature is twofold because it is part of the human and the non-human worlds and it has been treated as twofold by at least the Indo-Europeans. It is also maintained that the liminal Hellenistic period was decisive for the formation of folk worship because of the religious syncretism and the invasion of demons that dominated in the Eastern Mediterranean. The author points out its remarkable similarities to ancient Greek and Roman (and Indo-European) fertile, cathartic and other sacrificial practices. Due to industrialization of agriculture and rationalization of the magical way of thought of the "traditional" peasant, performance of the custom was transformed into a folkloric, spectacular one with intensely violent and sadistic behaviour on the part of humans in the places where it still took place after 1960. The writer argues that violence was always an inherent characteristic of the custom. Nonetheless, the archaic, and later folk thinking ritualized the performance and attributed to it a different facet, devoid of any sacred elements, during the 20th century where its inherent violence was manifested in its raw essence.