"Almost fainting with terror she [Europa, the Phoenician Princess of Tyre, Lebanon] glanced back, As she was carried away, at the shore left behind. As she gripped one Horn in her right hand while clutching the back of the beast with the other, Meanwhile her fluttering draperies billowed behind on the sea breeze."

- Ovid, "The Abduction of Europa," Metamorphosis [846-875]

In the myth, Europa is a Phoenician princess from Tyre—present-day Lebanon—taken across the sea by Zeus in the form of a bull. Though ancient, this image speaks uncannily to the modern Lebanese condition: a people repeatedly uprooted, gripped by forces beyond their control, and forced to look back at a homeland they are no longer certain they can return to.

Her terrified backward glance becomes emblematic of exile, nostalgia, and fractured belonging. For generations of Lebanese scattered by war, economic collapse, or disaster, the myth is not distant history—it is a living metaphor. Drapery caught in the wind becomes memory unraveling; the sea, a chasm between what is remembered and what is lost.

This work draws on that symbolism—bridging antiquity with the present, mythology with lived experience—to explore the emotional and cultural tensions of departure and identity.