The Ancestral Current

The origins of the tradition behind The Witch’s Cellar are connected, in part, to the region of Souli, although the complete genealogical path can no longer be established with absolute certainty. For a long period, Souli was a land marked by conflict and resistance during Ottoman rule, and its people were shaped by continual insecurity, loss, and the necessity of survival.

It was within this historical landscape that my ancestor, Eirini, emerged. According to family memory, she was connected to the Drakaioi family, one of the local families associated with resistance. Following a violent upheaval of the circumstances of that time, she left her homeland and arrived in Corfu as a refugee in 1882. Whether she was unmarried or widowed at the time, as well as many other details of her life, have since been lost to time. Those who might once have preserved these memories are gone, and with them disappeared fragments of her personal history.

She brought no material possessions with her. What she carried was practical knowledge of midwifery and herbal medicine, arts inseparably connected to what we would now call traditional folk magic and healing practice. In Souli, however, such knowledge was never necessarily given the name “magic.” It belonged to everyday life, to experience, and to the relationship between human beings, nature, the body, and the Unseen.

The derogatory epithet Gkiaourena¹ (“the infidel” or “the unbeliever”), given to her by the Ottomans, followed her like a shadow to Corfu. There, the local people gradually began to recognise her particular “sight”, a form of second sight through which she was believed to perceive the Unseen and discern the forces moving invisibly among the living.

Under the weight of being marked as different, Eirini soon married a considerably older but financially prosperous man from the Moraitika area. Although her age did not make her what would conventionally have been considered an “ideal bride” by the standards of the time, it was her striking beauty and force of character that captivated him. The village, however, had its own version of the story.

In 1886, Eirini gave birth to Eleni.

Eleni inherited her mother’s deep blue eyes and fair hair, and with them she inherited both the burden of the name Gkiaourena and the legacy of her mother’s Art. Growing up in Corfu during the Belle Époque, her character was shaped within an island that had successively absorbed Venetian, French, and finally British influences. It was a place of cultural convergence, where, from around the 1870s onward, a growing interest had developed in spiritualism and the occult currents emerging from Europe.

Yet while the urban society of Corfu was turning towards the fashionable spiritual movements arriving from abroad, the people of the villages understood Eleni’s power through a far more immediate and experiential lens. As the years passed and her actions spoke for themselves, the old epithet she had inherited from her mother gradually receded into the background, and the people of the surrounding villages gave her another name.

She became known as Maïssa, a woman whom people believed could cross the magnadi, the veil, and hold the keys to an unseen world that most feared, yet whose existence they nevertheless recognised.

As an experienced midwife and healer, possessed of a powerful temperament, formidable personality, and commanding presence, Eleni was said to be able to “read” the pain of the soul almost immediately. People believed that she possessed the power to “bind” and “loosen” the threads of fate belonging to those who came to her for help, always away from the light of day. Her power recognised no fixed moral boundary. At times it became medicine and salvation; at others, a dark curse capable of bringing destruction. The ordinary laws of the world did not restrain her. Above all else, she placed the necessity of the moment. If she believed it necessary, she was prepared to enter into the darkest bargain with the Unseen and offer whatever price it demanded.

At the same time, she possessed a deep and complex understanding of the Divine. Although she was an Orthodox Christian, she believed in a higher source of life, which she regarded as the true Creator, while the God of the Church represented only one divine power among many. She did not reject the God of the Church. She attended services and observed traditional religious customs. Yet within her personal practice, while angels, the Virgin Mary, and the saints were actively called upon and were believed to answer her summons, the God of the Church remained outside this particular relationship.

Eleni refused to confine herself to the customary role of a woman of the household, demanding absolute respect for the sacred position she believed she occupied as a guardian of life and knowledge. Her husband, Angelos, fascinated by the force of her character, assumed almost entirely the practical care of her and of the household, something considered extraordinary for the time. In return, she gave him four daughters, among them Angeliki, my great-grandmother.

Although Angeliki never formally followed in her mother’s footsteps, during my childhood there were many occasions when I saw her continue practices that had survived through family memory: burning herbs to remove the evil eye, weaving wreaths from blackberry branches to protect the household from unwanted presences and spirits, whispering words while sewing crosses with red thread, and preparing plates of food for her deceased mother on the appropriate days.

Angeliki maintained a deliberately low profile within the village community. Nevertheless, much was said, and is still said, about her and about Eleni. Some remember Eleni as a healer who saved lives; others condemned her as a witch. One thing, however, was never seriously disputed: her power.

When Angeliki’s only son was born (my grandfather), he found himself standing between two worlds. On one side was his grandmother Eleni, whose example had shaped his understanding of life; on the other was his desire to explain the inexplicable through science. He chose to become a surgeon specialising in gynaecology. In this modern form, he was in fact continuing Eleni’s work: the care and preservation of life itself.

Yet despite becoming a man of medicine, he never abandoned his roots. Throughout his career, before every birth and every surgical operation, he continued to recite the traditional words over burning herbs for the removal of the evil eye. At the same time, he devoted countless nights to recording, with painstaking attention, the stories of Eleni, the memories of Angeliki, and the unexplained events he had witnessed during his youth while growing up beside Eleni and his mother.

These writings became one of the principal foundations upon which the restoration of our family tradition was later built. Among the many accounts preserved in those notebooks is one that forms the philosophical foundation of the tradition itself. In it, Eleni explained the deeper spiritual significance of the olive tree and the olive mill.

For her, every olive represented the human spirit, born upon the branches of the ancestral tree. Just as different trees bear fruit of different colours, sizes, and forms, humanity manifests through countless outward differences while, in essence, sharing the same inner nature. When the olive ripens, it is separated from the branch and falls onto the harvesting nets. From there it passes through many hands until it reaches the olive mill, where it is placed beneath the heavy millstones and crushed until the golden oil concealed within it is released.

For Eleni, this entire journey was an image of human existence. The pressures, losses, disappointments, and hardships encountered throughout life are not merely meaningless suffering. They are the friction through which the Spirit gradually reveals itself. Just as the olive releases its hidden oil beneath the weight of the stones, so the human being reveals their deepest essence, concealed beneath the accumulated layers of the Soul.

Of course, the teachings preserved in my grandfather’s notebooks were not expressed in this modern language. They were recorded through simple expressions, local idioms, and a way of thinking belonging to their particular time and place. The account presented here is therefore a modern rendering of the deeper meaning Eleni was attempting to convey.

Today, The Witch’s Cellar occupies the very same space in which Eleni once worked. Here, where the heavy millstones once crushed the olives to release their golden oil beneath the hands of Angelos and Eleni, and later Angeliki and Dimitrios, I now continue my own magical work.

The olive mill is therefore more than a physical site within our family history. It is a living place of memory, and a fixed axis of the ancestral current that emerged once again from the depths of oblivion.