Why Is Medusa on the Sicilian Flag? (And why nobody took her down)

She was displayed to stop something — and nobody has ever taken her down, because maybe there’s an ingrained belief that it could help if harm were to return.

She’s a gorgoneion: a Gorgon’s head, set on a building to protect it, or on the armor worn by a warrior. For most of a thousand years that face was what you fixed to a shield, at a gate, in a doorway, so whatever was coming had to meet it first. We know parts of Sicily were Greek before any of it was Italian — and the belief in this symbol is part of how we know that to be true.

There was a line in the budget for belief

A gorgoneion isn’t a picture of Medusa. It’s equipment. The Greeks called objects like this apotropaic, from the verb for turning a thing away — which is not a category in a museum catalog, it’s a job description.

So she went where harm arrives. Over the door. Along the eaves, on the tile-ends. Into the pediment, the triangle above a temple’s entrance.

All of that took time and materials, and the community decided a face was worth having up there.

We don’t build that in much anymore. We design for clean, and clean mostly turns out to mean empty — a room with nothing in it but your own thoughts. Which is fine, but I find my thoughts more entertaining with a bit of mythology around.

We’ve always been superstitious

A horseshoe over a barn door. An evil eye on a keyring. A saint’s medal on a dashboard and a rosary on the bedpost. A hamsa in a hallway. Something of your grandmother’s you have never thrown away and could not entirely explain why.

I’ve heard the saying that locks are for honest people — meaning a lock stops nobody who really means harm. What it does is mark a line, and we trust most people to respect it.

That’s the same bet as a face over a door. You’re not stopping anything. You’re marking a line for that one thing in people we all hope is there, in the best and the worst of us.

Leave it to the Greeks to be less shy about it. They gave it a face, they put it at the most public point of the most important building in town, and they made it enormous.

It’s also the face on Athena’s shield, which is a story of its own — the goddess of the city wearing the monster on her chest, protection borrowed from the thing everyone was frightened of.

[ the gorgon collection — ck_002 ]

Medusa, Southern Italy

Archaic Southern Italy, c. 500 BCE

One of her oldest and most primal faces — the archaic Gorgon, set at a threshold to turn harm away. Hand-painted and sealed in our Los Angeles studio, so no two are the same.

$42.00

[ see the piece ]

hand-painted & sealed · ships from our studio

Why she’s still flying over Sicily

The symbol has a name. It’s the Trinacria, from the Greek for three-pointed — which was the oldest name anyone had for the island.

Three bent legs for Sicily’s three capes — Peloro, Passero, Lilibeo — with the Gorgon at the center. Struck on coins at Syracuse from around 382 BCE. Taken up by the independence movement in 1943. Made the official Sicilian flag on 4 January 2000.

Read that last one again. In the year 2000, a modern European government sat down to choose a flag for five million people — and kept the monster.

Then there’s the detail almost nobody mentions. The three ears of wheat around her head aren’t Greek at all. They’re Roman, added once Sicily became the empire’s grain supply, pointing at Demeter — Ceres, to them — whose cult was already unusually strong on the island. The same goddess and the same crop turn up a long way east, in the grain at Eleusis.

So an entire second civilization showed up, looked at a face already centuries old, and decided not to replace it. They added to it.

Most symbols are forgotten. Not this one.

There are people still speaking the ancient language

Magna Graecia — Greater Greece, the Roman name for the Greek cities across Sicily and the southern mainland — is supposed to be long gone.

On the slopes of the Aspromonte, in Calabria, two or three hundred people still speak a Greek dialect called Greko, or Griko. UNESCO listed it as seriously endangered in 1999. It isn’t a revival and it isn’t a heritage project — it came over with the colonies and never entirely stopped.

We don’t think this survived because it was protected. It survived because people kept it around. And just like that 2,000 years go by and we’re still here, holding on to some essence of what’s never really left us at all.

It makes us wonder what other remarkable things are still sitting in plain sight, doing a job nobody remembers giving them. And how much meaning we’ve lost without ever noticing it go.

We have two on our doors. Maybe it’s for decoration, but I couldn’t help but feel I was doing one more thing to make this home feel like my own — and have the right energies working in our favor, if I can help it.

Frequently asked

What does the Sicilian flag mean?

Three bent legs for Sicily’s three capes — Peloro, Passero and Lilibeo — around the head of Medusa, with three ears of wheat. The legs are the island’s shape, the Gorgon is protection, and the wheat is the grain that made Sicily matter to Rome.

Is the head on the Sicilian flag really Medusa?

Yes — it’s a gorgoneion, the Gorgon head used across the Greek world to turn harm away. On the modern flag she’s usually winged, which is how the archaic versions were often carved.

Why does Medusa have snakes for hair in some images and not others?

Because she changed. The archaic Gorgon — the oldest of these faces, and the one on the flag — is a grimacing mask with a lolling tongue and bared teeth, made to frighten rather than to be admired. From around the fifth century BCE she slowly turned human and beautiful, and the snakes became the thing you noticed. The version most people picture today — anguished, snakes writhing, caught mid-scream — is largely a Baroque invention, fixed in place by painters like Caravaggio around 1600. That’s the century our Baroque Medusa comes from.

Is the Trinacria the same thing as a triskelion?

A triskelion is any three-limbed rotating figure, and several cultures have one. The Trinacria is Sicily’s: three human legs with a gorgoneion at the center. Every Trinacria is a triskelion; it doesn’t work the other way round.

Clay and Kelsy · Los Angeles
Sources and further reading: Flag of Sicily · Gorgoneion · Greek-speakers in Italy, Minority Rights Group