When the first official Olympic mascot—a rainbow-hued dachshund named Waldi—debuted at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, Germany, it became a popular symbol of both the international event and the host country. Since then, most Olympic mascots have been colorful animal characters. For the 2024 Summer Olympics, however, host country France has chosen a hat with an almost unpronounceable name.
Smiley Phryge (pronounced, with French style, as “Free-juh”) represents what’s known as a Phrygian cap, based on similar caps worn by 18th-century French revolutionaries, who saw it as a symbol of freedom. In Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People, the allegorical figure of Liberty hoists the French flag while wearing such a cap, with its distinctive forward-facing tip.
But while France’s Phryge is now canonized as an Olympic mascot (a fellow Phyrge represents the Paralympics), the origin of the cap goes back thousands of years, making appearances in the Trojan War, the legend of King Midas, and even the American Revolution.
Tales of the Phrygians
The cap gets its name from Phrygia, an ancient kingdom located in what is now central Turkey. Researchers think the Phrygians migrated there from the Balkans around 1200 B.C. and built their capital at the site of Gordion.
King Midas drinking glass of wine which turns to gold as it touches his lips in a 7th-century painting by Nicolas Tournier. Archaeologists believe a “real” King Midas once ruled Phrygia.
Photograph by Photo Bonhams, London, UK, Bridgeman Images
And while most people are unfamiliar with the Phrygians, they feature prominently in stories still told today: The legendary king Midas was cursed to turn everything into gold, but archaeologists think Midas was a real—and very wealthy—Phrygian king who ruled in the eighth century B.C.
University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Brian Rose, who has led excavations at Gordion since 2013, believes the myth of Midas’ “Golden Touch” may have originated with the clothing of Phrygian aristocrats, who wore garments dyed with a particular pigment to give them a golden sheen. The tens of thousands of stunning artifacts recovered at Gordion, including vessels and jewelry of gold and fine wooden furniture, attest to the Phrygians’ great—and very real—wealth.
A 2021 aerial photo shows the ancient Phrygian city of Gordion in central Turkey. The first excavation at the site took place in 1900.
Photograph by Mustafa Kaya Xinhua, eyevine/Redux
Then there’s the Gordion Knot, an intricate tangle of rope said to have been tied by Midas’ father Gordias (also a real person, for whom Gordion was named) and which was displayed in the capital’s Temple of Zeus.
Legend stipulated that only a person who untied it could rule over Asia, but the knot remained resolutely fastened until Alexander the Great visited Gordion in 333 B.C. and simply slashed it apart with his sword.
The Phrygian cap (and future Olympic mascot) first appears in a carved depiction of a cavalryman found at Gordion and dating from the early ninth century B.C. “That’s the earliest visual reference we have,” says Rose.
Cap of otherness
Rose notes the ancient Greeks considered the Trojans in Homer’s Iliad to be associates of the Phrygians—and the Iliad itself records that Trojan queen Hecuba was the daughter of a Phrygian king.
Mythical Troy was on the Anatolian coast, far from the Phrygian heartland, but the ancient Greek association may be evidence of Phrygian power.
A central character in the Iliad is the Trojan prince Paris, who ultimately sparks the Trojan War when goddesses ask him to decide who was the most beautiful. That scene—known as the Judgement of Paris—was a popular subject of ancient Greek artists.
Artistic depictions of the Trojan prince often featured him wearing a Phrygian cap, which was visual shorthand that he was not Greek, says Margaret Miller, professor emerita of archaeology at Australia’s University of Sydney.
Paris wears several different Phrygian caps in different artworks, one of which looks to be made from an animal skin—and Miller thinks this may have been the origin of the distinctive style, with the head or neck of an animal skin forming the cap’s distinctive “horn” or forward-facing tip.
Eventually, the Phrygian cap became a symbol in Greek art for anyone from what’s now the Middle East, including Persians and the Medes. Much later it became associated with the Roman god Mithras, who supposedly originated in Persia.
The Phrygian cap even became an emblem of Rome itself: according to Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem written in the first century B.C., the Trojan hero Aeneas and his followers arrived in Italy after the Trojan War and founded the city of Alba Longa a few miles from the future site of Rome.
Because the mother of Rome’s mythical founder Romulus was the daughter of Alba Longa’s king, the Romans could claim descent from the Trojans, making the Phrygian cap a symbol of their foreign origins.
Symbol of liberty
After the end of the Roman Empire, however, the symbolism of the Phrygian cap becomes unclear.
Roman art features another type of cap, a conical hat called the pileus, which was given to Roman slaves when they were freed and became a visual symbol of manumission, or freedom from slavery.
Rose thinks ancient depictions of the pileus and the Phrygian cap became muddled in the 18th century, when revolutionary artists in Europe looked for symbols of freedom in Roman art.
“When the French and British wanted to choose a cap of liberty from antiquity, they got it wrong,” he says. “They chose the Phrygian cap, which signified Middle East status, rather than the pileus, which signified liberty—and so the Phrygian cap came to be interpreted as a symbol of liberty.”
From America to France
The “liberty cap” seems to have first appeared in pre-revolutionary America in the artwork of silversmith Paul Revere, who created several silver bowls in the 1760s that featured the Roman symbol, according to a 1987 article by Yvonne Korshak, professor emerita of art history at New York’s Adelphi University.
A patriotic button from the time of the American Revolution features a “liberty cap,” a rattlesnake, and 13 eggs representing the united colonies.
Photograph by Don Troiani, Bridgeman Images
But Revere’s depictions show a rounded cap rather than the forward-pointing Phrygian cap; in that form it became a common symbol of the American Revolution, appearing in paintings, in seals, and on flags.
A few years after the American Revolution, however, the Phrygian cap in its original shape became a symbol of revolutionary France—possibly because, as Korshak notes, it resembled the stocking caps commonly worn by French workers.
In the course of the French Revolution, and for many years afterwards, the Phrygian cap appeared in paintings, illustrations, and on statues of Marianne, the mythical personification of the French Republic that still decorate many town halls.
Now, as a symbol of the French Republic and of freedom, this 3,000-year-old humble piece of headwear is set to adorn t-shirts, keychains, and plush toys—a remarkable journey from its origins in an ancient kingdom.
A 250-year-old felt Phrygian cap from the time of the French Revolution.
Photograph by Archives Charmet, Bridgeman Images
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