To understand the history of the delicious honey cookie known as melomakarona, we must go back to ancient Greece. The pantheon of Greek gods is expansive, with a god or goddess devoted to entire realms, such as Hades ruling over the underworld and Poseidon over the sea, or ruling over smaller domains like Hypnos, the god of sleep. The story of melomakarona starts with Makaria, the goddess of blessed death. Her name doesn’t appear very often in Greek mythology, though at times, she is also described as the goddess of the Elysian Fields, the area of the afterlife where the souls of heroes and the virtuous go to rest. The belief in Makaria promised peace and serenity after death.
