"This is the end of a story. A refugee night. All swelling with unspoken questions that have no other sense than being asked to oneself and the silence. A stifling night bursting with cool stars, and the stage quiet and dark, like the childhood days. If only you would know how unspeakable is the misery at a time when the world is broken and ground into pieces, floating on the rotting brain of fear, awakening swarms of phantoms and shivers. The green darkness of the sea, the gold of the dead straw, the tree tops of Colchis nesting the gargling of a man drowning in the fish pond… I do not recall what happened then, I merely remember that after that night the crimson day had flown from the gate of the East over some new ships…"

Darko Lukić:

MEDEAS´ NEW STORIES – TRACES OF MEMORIES

„Every crime which can be perpetrated, will be perpetrated.“  / Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

Medea and Jason are the central figures in one of the fundamental myths of the world, THE ARGONAUTS and THE GOLDEN FLEECE. The secret of this myth has not yet been lifted; the veil of mystery still surrounds it. The protagonist Jason can not exist without the barbarous Medea, the love of whom has enthroned him to greater extent than his heroic voyage with the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece, the symbol that would bring him lordly power and authority. Paradoxically – the acquisition of the Golden Fleece did not bring Jason neither the kingdom nor the power he wanted. In the same way his forerunners have lost them by trying to acquire them through the Golden Fleece. He ended under the shipwreck of the famous ship Argo. After that the Golden Fleece disappeared from the stories. It comes back to Europe centuries later as the esoteric and mystic order of the Knights Templar, the knowledge of which is being passed on through the ruling families. They suffered their downfall with the Habsburg Empire. Ferdinand of Habsburg wore the symbol of the Golden Fleece as an emblem on his chest amid other insignia, but after he was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, when the Habsburg kingdom declined and with it the last of the Roman Empire, the Golden Fleece – the symbol of divine authority and that of malediction and misery, finally disappeared. It is difficult to know if the sorceress Medea knew this, when she betrayed her father and brother in order to enable the foreigner Jason, with whom she was madly in love, to acquire it. As a sorceress she might at least sense what great secret the Dragon in the holly forest holds. Escaping with his beloved and the Golden Fleece from their pursuers Medea traveled with the Argonauts and their ship Argo a miraculous voyage, which some of the researches of the Balkans determine as the possible cultural and political borders of the Balkans. Medea, in love, betrayed and forced into a barbaric and bloody vendetta, betrayed her father and brother, killed her own children and her adversary, but couldn’t gain Jason’s love. No one would remember Jason if it hadn’t been for Medea who gave him everything: love, their sons, power – when he couldn’t repay her not even with a touch of human kindness. She gave everything up for him: her fatherland, her people, her parents, her name and honor. For her he couldn’t even sacrifice his dream of power. Medea is remembered in the tragedy of Euripides, on the basis of which other dramatists wrote their´s, such as Seneca, Ovid, Corneille, Grillparzer and Anouilh. Medea´s story is in its essence an intimate tragedy of an ungrateful love. The Chorus around her sings of politics, history, domination, wars, the Olympic Games, the Golden Fleece, emperors, cities, local cults, magic rituals and legends.

Medea's press statement : 

“In the very beginning there is no past from which we descend. There is only the future which has to be completed with patient endurance of the present. And that is my story. Euripides´ story is his and does not belong to me, it speaks of some other woman. In view of Jason ... maybe ... This memory resembles him, Jason on the ship-deck ... Although in my memory he is much more beautiful. When my soul has summoned him from the past, he became more beautiful, because of the light with which it enlightened him. „I know you stranger“, he said, „because I saw you once in my heart“. I was too touched by the word „heart“, and never noticed he called me a „stranger“. But that is what I always was, for him and for others. He always needed the others ... the Argonauts ... me ... Creon ... her ... Look into the woods, Jason. Only the animals, which cannot survive alone, gather with the herd. I don´t remember anymore. My mind is stuck. It doesn’t move into the past, nor into the future. It has to be a memory. It can’t be nothing. But all of this is so old ... it was so long ago. Him and the memory and the ship. And his dreams of the Golden Fleece ... in which I sank, in which I drowned ... Are we condemned to dream the dreams of others? To carry the weight of the hope of others? The cruelty of the world threw us out of our dreams. We looked awful when we awoke. Nothing could be seen upon waking. The transparent greyness of long dead shadows. They thought they were alive and real. From fear I escaped back into the dream. When I awoke, the outside looked the same. Unbearably grey. Unmovable. Only in dreams time flows and the world changes. Between them there is a grey wasteland. In this garden of which I dream, no child is going to play, no couple will kiss. It is a garden of spirits. Beauty without sense. An empty dream. It came out of my love like an actor leaving the scene. In a hurry, without looking back, he changed his costume and left ... Leave me alone with my memory. It is only a picture, which once broke in two across the surface of my eyes. The past, however long it took, one hour or a thousand years, has the same thickness of oblivion. The future comes in tiny grains of sand.

It was a long time ago, when my present couldn´t give birth to any future. I said: „You´re leaving me? If they find me, who will have mercy for a traitor like me? I have nowhere to go, than to go where you go. You snatched all the other ways from me. Your spirit blended with mine. We are one. When they touch you, they touch me. There is no parting for us.“ He said nothing. He didn´t hear anything, because he was too busy listening. He never flinched. He never noticed I was dying. Only his horses wept. Nothing happened between us. He sailed, I followed. And yes, I loved him. Nothing happened between us. We just lived under the same deck. It was a house of sorrow. Everything inside her was dying, except the sorrow. It´s meaningless to talk about it ... it doesn´t matter ... Same things are going to happen, they always do, the same moments come after those which went. The future is so easy to foretell. It is that yesterday, boringly the same, and it doesn´t resemble in the slightest the sameness of tomorrow. The best prophet of the future is the past. The future is made from our memories, which we can´t yet remember. But why am I telling you this? Wonders do not exist for those, who do not dare to wonder.”