The Spring Of Wine (Η Άνοιξη του Κρασιού)

-From The Meletic Tales

In Nysa, where the hills breathe the scent of vine and laurel, the seasons passed in quiet rhythm, each day folded in the hands of nature. The people lived simply, tending to olive groves and vineyards that clung to the slopes, drawing sweetness from the sun. They were content, if not particularly wise, and the village echoed more with laughter than with questions.

It began on the cusp of spring. A shepherd, young and untroubled by thought, came running down the hillside one morning, shouting about a miracle. In a hollow between two elder trees, where a dry spring had long sat forgotten, water now flowed—except it was not water.

It was wine. Word passed like wind. By dusk, the entire village had gathered at the spring. Cups were drawn, hands cupped, lips pressed eagerly. The wine was sweet, almost celestial in its taste, and the air filled with laughter, singing and the clinking of clay cups.

'It is a gift. A gift from the land!' Cried Anaximenes the village elder, raising her arms as if to bless the vines themselves.

From that day, the rhythm of Nysa changed. No longer did the villagers rise early to tend the earth. The vineyards, once carefully pruned, began to wither at their edges. The potter’s wheel, the carpenter’s chisel, the weaver’s loom—all slowed, then stopped.

All, except one, Kyros the potter continued his work. He lived alone at the edge of the village, near the mountain path. Quiet by nature, he spoke little and drank less. When the others revelled, he sat by the stream that trickled down from the mountain, filling his jug with cool water. They were corrupted not by the wine itself, but by their acts of vanity. They sought only the whims of pleasure than the frution of wisdom.

‘You do not drink with us, Kyros?' Asked a woman one evening, her voice light with the warmth of wine.

‘I drink what the mountain offers me’, he replied.

She laughed, touched his arm, and left to join the chorus of dancers by the spring.

Kyros worked beneath his open shelter, his wheel spinning with the same calm rhythm it always had. His hands, coated in clay, remembered a discipline that his neighbours had let slip. Each morning, he fetched water from the high stream that trickled from the rocks above the vineyards—cool, clean and forgotten by all but him.

His pots grew in number. Simple. Symmetrical. Made for use, not display. He stored them outside his hut, near the olive trees, where the breeze carried no scent of wine but rather of thyme and sun-warmed stone.

One morning, a girl approached him—Myrine, the daughter of the vintner. Her feet were bare and stained dark with wine. Her hair was tangled, and her eyes, once alight with cheer, now shimmered with uncertainty.

‘Kyros, why do you not come down to the spring and join the others? They say you think yourself better than us', she said, hesitating near the rows of pots.

Kyros looked up from his work but did not stop his wheel. ‘I think no such thing, but I have work to do, and thirst that wine cannot quench', he said.

Myrine frowned. ‘What is the harm in joy? In forgetting the weight of the day? Haven’t we earned that much?’

‘Joy is not the harm, but forgetting that we are more than our pleasures can become a kind of blindness or obsession', he responded.

She sat beside him then, watching the clay form under his hands. ‘Everything tastes of wine now. Even the bread. Even the air. I wake with heaviness, not song. I thought it would bring us closer, but... we only seem to speak in sharpness now’, she said after a while.

Kyros nodded. ‘The spring gives you wine, but it takes away the pause between sips. Without pause, how can one feel gratitude?’

She stayed in silence, then rose and left, barefoot, a question forming within her.

As the days turned to weeks, the spring did not cease, and the villagers, emboldened by its constancy, gave themselves wholly to mere pleasure. Songs turned to slurred speech. Laughter turned to quarrels. Small disputes grew heavy, like grapes left too long on the vine.

As the days grew hotter, tempers shortened. The villagers bickered in the square over who should fetch more jars, who had stolen whose cup, who had failed to refill the troughs for the mules. The laughter that once echoed in the hills had thinned to a kind of restless murmur—the sound of many voices without meaning.

Kyros watched, as he continued to shape his clay, forming vessels that no one came to buy. He fired them still, arranging them along his shelves like quiet sentinels.

One morning, the spring’s wine flowed darker. None remarked it. They drank.

By summer, the fields lay bare. Children wandered without guidance, their laughter hollow. Couples argued in the shade of vines gone wild. The air carried not the scent of laurel but of spilt drink and idle breath. It was then that the first left.

The turning came slowly, like dawn through mist. First, the vines wilted. Their roots, overfed by the sweetness of the spring, began to rot. Then, the wine turned sour. Not all at once, but enough to be noticed. Jars were opened and poured away. The air near the spring grew acrid. Panic crept in.

‘We must cleanse the spring!’ Cried the butcher.

‘We must make an offering!’ Shouted the vintner.

‘We must blame someone!’ Others insinuated—and eyes turned to Kyros.

‘He never drank! He never joined! Perhaps he curst it with his scorn’.

When they came to his shelter, Kyros stood waiting, calm and unafraid.

‘I curst nothing, but I listened to the stillness. And the stillness has spoken', he uttered.

They hesitated, uneasy. Myrine stepped ahead. Her face, now thinner, held no accusation—only sorrow.

‘What do we do now?’ She asked.

Kyros wiped his hands and stood straight. ‘You remember what you’ve forgotten. That wine was meant to taste, not blind. That joy should not drown purpose. That silence can heal in time’.

‘The spring is foul’, said a merchant.

‘Then walk higher. Past the vineyard. Past the laurels. There is water still. Pure. Waiting', said Kyros.

They did not all believe him, but some did. Myrine, for one did. A handful of others who no longer trusted the sweetness on their tongues.

The climb was steep, but the path clearer than they remembered. At its end, the spring—the true spring—flowed in a cold stream from the rockface. They drank through the fog in their minds. Their limbs felt lighter. Their breath deepened.

They filled their jars. They returned. One by one, more villagers followed. The wine-spring was left to itself—a curiosity of the past. The village changed, slowly.

The vines that could be saved were saved. The rest were pulled, and new shoots planted. Fields were tended. Tools mended. Conversations no longer veiled in drink became honest—sometimes painful, but honest.

Kyros' pots sold again. Not as luxuries, but as vessels of daily use. Each one marked with a small swirl on the base—his quiet symbol of flow and stillness.

Myrine began pressing olives. Her hands, once idle, found joy in rhythm again. She came to Kyros often, sometimes to talk and sometimes to help. They said little, but something in their silences spoke more than any song.

As the years passed. The wine-spring dried on its own, as if tired of being misunderstood.

Children asked their elders, ‘Is it true the spring once ran with wine?’

The elders would nod and say, ‘Yes. And we drank too much of it until we were lost in our indulgence’.

‘Why did you stop?’

‘Because we forgot ourselves’.

The children, wide-eyed, would ask, ‘Who remembered you?’

To which the elders would smile and say, ‘A potter. A quiet man who listened to the mountain, and not to his thirst’.

In this remembering, Nysa healed.

Those people who had remained—those who had chosen water over wine—had clear eyes. They rebuilt. Slowly. Without much grandeur.

Those who returned came not in shame, but in silence. They carried stories, memories and regrets. They asked not for forgiveness, but for purpose.

Alexina, once a voice of joy, sat beneath the trees and whispered, ‘A gift is only a gift when we are ready to receive it’.

Kyros offered her a cup—not of wine, but of water from the mountain.

‘Drink. There is still time', he said.

She drank. The village never returned to what it was. It became something else. Wiser. Quieter. Children learnt to ask questions. Elders learned to listen.

The clay vessels sold once more. Not for gold, but for grain, or song, or the promise of help in winter.

In the square, beneath the canopy of laurel and vine, the villagers carved a stone. Upon it, they wrote: ‘In the days of wine, we lost our hands. In the days of water, we found our souls'.

The mountain watched in silence.

One evening, many years later, a traveller paused at the potter’s home. The shelves still bore fine vessels, etched with flowing lines. The traveller, dusty from the road, asked for water. Kyros, now grey-haired but steady, filled a cup and handed it to him.

‘This place is quiet and peaceful', said the traveller.

‘It was not always the case’, Kyros replied.

‘Why did you stay?’

The potter looked out towards the hills, where the vines once ran wild.

‘Because silence is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of the truth’.

The traveller drank. He said nothing more. When he left at dawn, he carried with him a clay cup.

One night, under a full moon, the old musician Stratonicus climbed the hill with his lyre. He played, hoping the strings would awaken something soft in the souls of his neighbours, but his music was met with jeers.

‘Play something worth dancing to!’ Someone shouted.

‘Slower than a drunk tortoise!’ Came another voice expressed.

He lowered the lyre and descended in silence, his shadow long and lean in the moonlight.

Only Kyros, working by the light of an oil lamp, heard the notes and bowed his head with quiet reverence.

One misted morning, when the dew still clung like pearls to the leaves, Kyros woke earlier than usual. There was a stirring in the air, not of unease, but of something readying itself to emerge—as if the village were a breath being held.

He walked beyond the olive grove and followed the stream until it broke into a pool beside a cluster of wild irises. There he sat, clay jug in hand and watched the way the water caught the pale light of dawn. It glimmered not like gold, but like something older—something honest.

Soon after, Stratonicus joined him, settling onto the mossy stone without a word. His lyre hung over his shoulder, silent. They sat together like stones that had always been there, needing no speech to share the hour.

Stratonicus eventually spoke. 'I’ve started to dream again, Kyros. Not of music, but of planting. Strange'.

‘Strange only if you think music and soil do not share the same root’, Kyros said.

The old musician smiled. ‘You speak like someone who’s been listening to the ground’.

‘I have. It remembers more than we do', Kyros said.

They sat for a long time. The stream babbled beside them. Birds moved through the laurel. The air shifted with the scent of rosemary.

Later that day, the village gathered in the square—not for a festival, but for something more revealing: conversation. A council of sorts had begun forming, though no one called it that. It was simply a space to speak and to hear.

Myrine stood, her hands stained with olive oil and ash. She held up one of Kyros' clay cups and turned it in her hand. ‘We used to drink without knowing what we drank. We thought it was joy, but it was only escape. Escape is a door that always locks behind you’.

Others nodded, murmured in agreement. Some looked away, their faces warm with memory.

‘The spring taught us something’, said old Leda, her voice steadier than it had been in years. ‘It showed us what happens when we forget the value of effort—the virtue of being present in our own lives’.

A young boy, no more than ten, raised his hand and asked, ‘Will it come back —the wine?’

There was a pause. ‘Perhaps. If it does, we’ll greet it with different hearts’, Kyros replied.

The boy nodded solemnly, as if he understood—and in a way, he did.

That evening, the villagers worked together to clear the overgrown paths. Lanterns were lit along the main road for the first time in seasons. The baker reopened her oven, now stoked not for celebration, but for nourishment. The blacksmith reheated his forge. Laughter returned—not wild and reckless, but warm and anchored.

Under the starlight, they repaired the old well that had fallen into disuse when the spring of wine first appeared. Stone by stone, bucket by bucket, they brought it back to life. No ceremony marked its return. No trumpet of announcement. Just the simple turning of a wheel and the sound of water, true and cool, rising to meet them.

Myrine passed Kyros a ladleful, and they drank in silence.

She watched him for a moment and said, ‘I think we forgot what thirst really was’.

‘And now?’ He asked.

‘Now I think we know. Not just what it feels like… but why it matters’.

The next morning, the potter walked to the old vineyard, where gnarled, leafless vines still curled around broken trellises. He touched the bark and found, to his quiet surprise, a faint pulse—sap, moving beneath the surface. Life, still present.

He fetched shears, rope, and time. Others joined him. Not in haste, but in rhythm. The land began to speak again—through the stretch of earth, the tilt of sun, the patient hum of insects returning.

Kyros and Myrine worked side by side, replanting the rows. They did not speak often, but when they did, their words were careful and meaningful — like water poured slowly into thirsty soil.

In time, the village began shaping itself around this new understanding. No one tried to recreate the festivals that had once spun out of control. Instead, they honoured smaller moments. A good harvest. A child’s question. The first bloom of a wild flower. These were the new celebrations.

Kyros continued making pots, even though now he taught others—not just how to shape clay, but how to observe it, how to know its mood by touch. The children listened. Some were clumsy, some gifted, but all were present.

He would tell them, as they spun their wheels, ‘Clay remembers what hands forget. So shape it with patience’.

Thus, they did. At the edge of the village, near where the wine-spring had once gushed, a stone bench was placed. Not to mark the site with reverence, but as a reminder. Upon it was inscribed in Myrine’s hand:

‘When joy turns to sleep, let truth awaken us’.

Visitors came in later years. They would ask, 'Is it true? Wine flowed from a spring here?'

The villagers would smile, never quite answering directly. 'We remember the taste, but we remember the silence more', they said.

In that silence, Meleticism lived—not in books or temples, but in the everyday: in the careful tending of vines, the shaping of vessels, and the sharing of cool, clear water under the sun.

When the elders grew older, they told the tale not with warning, but with wonder. ‘The spring gave us wine,’ they would say, ‘but it was thirst that taught us to live.’

Some carved small symbols—swirls, streams and vines—into the doorposts of their homes, not as charms, but as reminders: of temperance, of clarity, of the stillness within.

Kyros aged gently, his hands slower but no less steady. As Myrine pressed a vessel into the hands of a child one morning, she whispered, ‘May you drink deeply—not just from the cup, but from the moment.’

‘This place is quiet and peaceful', said the traveller.

‘It was not always the case’, Kyros replied.

‘Why did you stay?’

The potter looked out towards the hills, where the vines once ran wild.

‘Because silence is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of the truth’.

The traveller drank. He said nothing more. When he left at dawn, he carried with him a clay cup.

In time, others came. Not to see the spring, long since forgotten, but to hear the tale. Some stayed. Others wandered on.

All remembered the truth that had lived, once, in a spring of wine—and the stillness that remained after the last drop fell brought awareness.

Thus in the quietude, Meleticism whispered through the leaves and into the souls of those people willing to hear and practise its philosophy.

In the quiet rhythm of seasons, Nysa endured—not as it had been, but as it had become. The people no longer sought self-indulgence; they sought understanding. They taught their children not to crave what dazzles, but to notice what endures: a friend’s silence, a stream’s flow, the honesty of labour. They also were taught the Meletic virtues.

Sometimes, when the wind shifted, villagers thought they caught the faint scent of wine on the breeze, but no one chased it.

Instead, they stood still, breathed deeply, and returned to their work— knowing that the real wonder was not in the spring, but in their awakening.

Travellers still came, drawn by whispers of a village where wine once flowed like water, but what they found was not indulgence, nor spectacle—only a people grounded, with eyes that held the calm of lived truth. Some stayed, not because of myth, but because of the peace that lingered in every shared task and spoken word.

When asked what changed them, the villagers would often point not to the past, but to the mountain, to the stream, to the clay. For it was there—in what remained steady—that they had remembered themselves and one another.

Recommend Write a Review Report