I awoke one night from a dream; someone had whispered to me, “Remember this song,” and I woke up, humming it. Weeks later, it returned to me randomly one afternoon. I could hear it in my mind, but when I tried to commit it to memory, when I tried to sound it into life, it eluded me like a ghost.
I wonder if my recent research brings this on, if there is something epigenetically waiting to reveal itself. You see, when you open the vault of your own genetic code, you quickly realize you are not a static entity, but a living mosaic.
At first glance, my autosomal baseline tells a clear, foundational story — anchored firmly in the deep soil of Western Europe and the British Isles. But beneath that sturdy canopy lie the faint, glowing embers of trace ancestry: quiet pulses of the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, and the ancient Aegean.
When you cross-reference data from calculators like Eurogenes and MDLP with painstaking genealogical research, those traces bring your entire story to life. For me, they traced the footsteps of my family who pulled up roots in Baden-Württemberg and the Palatinate, journeyed through the frontier kingdom of Hungary, and spread into the wild, sun-drenched steppes of Odesa, Bessarabia, and the Crimean peninsula.
They were not merely migrating across land; they were stepping into the footprint of classical antiquity. When my ancestors broke the virgin sod of Wittenberg, pastured livestock near Alt-Posttal, and raised stone walls in Alt-Arcis, they were living in the immediate shadow of ancient Greek colony cities like Tyras and Theodosia.
I can only imagine how it must have been to walk Tyras’ old cobblestones, to see the ancient burial mounds of the Scythian and Sarmatian, then to witness the Dniester River meet the Black Sea, and gaze upon the massive, stone-towered fortress of Akkerman.
My GEDmatch results — where calculators like Eurogenes K13 and K15 consistently surface traces of Aegean, Thessalian, and Central Greek DNA alongside a prominent Caucasian/Anatolian signature in MDLP — are the genetic receipts of that landscape. Whether forged through ancient coastal trade or generations of living along the Black Sea crossroads, those quiet percentages prove that my people did not just live among the ruins of ancient Greece; the story of those classical shores became woven into the very fabric of who I am.
And I wonder whose song keeps trying to come to me? Could it be the oldest Greek song, the Seikilos Epitaph, or the Delphic Hymns of the Aegean, or the music of my steppe & black sea ancestors? I guess only time, and more research will tell…..
Original article: https://ladyannselene23.substack.com/p/the-greeks-the-black-sea-and-me