Female Servants Research Articles

Służące domowe we współczesnej literaturze popularnonaukowej

The article offers a critical reading of two popular science works about domestic servants Służące do wszystkiego [Servants for Everything]by Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak and Instrukcja nadużycia [Instruction on Abuse] by Alicja Urbanik-Kopeć. According to the author, until recently domestic servants in Poland were exclusively the subject of academic consideration. At present, the subject has been taken up by popular science literature, which offers the reader a portrait of an archetypal female servant – a young (about 20–25 years old) and uneducated single woman, tormented by life and exploited by “masters”. The author of the review ponders the question to what extent such a portrait genuinely reflects historical reality. She believes that the books under discussion deploy certain historical and literary tropes, which are intended to portray the history of servants and employers in a certain way. This raises the question of why exactly this way of narrating the subject has gained an audience, and whether it really fulfills the need to give voice to servants.

Making the Private Public: Witnessing Female Infanticide in Nineteenth‐Century Kathiawar

AbstractNineteenth‐century British colonial discourses on female infanticide in India were marked not only by horror but also by frustration at being unable to detect its commission or identify its perpetrators. But in 1835, after years of thwarted efforts, three cases of daughter‐murder were successfully investigated in quick succession in the tributary of Kathiawar. This article uses manuscript transcripts of one of these cases to show the investigation's reliance on midwives and female servants as witnesses. Focusing on their testimony, the article shows how these women became critical participants in the colonial epistemology of female infanticide, informing and framing British understanding of this crime while also challenging it.

Karaikalammayar - A Study

The Nayanmars were fully dedicated to saivite doctrines and served godly. The theory of purity of the mind rather than the strength of the body is intertwined with the life of the holy woman, which causes the emergence of karaikalammayar article from time to time. In this respect, the article reviews karaikalammayar, the only female servant of the sixty-three, on the basis of the Saiva theory, in an amicable and critical perspective.

Responses to traveling Indian ayahs in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement for both colonizers and colonized across the world. This study focuses on Indian traveling ayahs (female servants and nannies) who traveled between India and Britain, but often underwent periods of destitution in Britain before returning to India. Using case studies of destitute ayahs, this essay investigates how the British state, British persons and British institutions responded to the destitution of imperial subjects from overseas in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study examines the social, legal and economic power dynamics underlying these responses, revealing a combination of confrontation and collaboration between migrant colonized subjects and those engaging with them in responding to contradictory imperial polices. The article highlights the agency of a neglected group of women who, in asserting their contribution to the Empire and their rights as imperial subjects, refused to accept a second-class form of Britishness.

Misogyny in Brazilian Federal Government Agencies for Science and High-Education.

The transformation of women's role in society has been systematically studied. Numerous authors point out that among the factors of extreme relevance to this fact, the main is the increased presence of women in the formal job market. Researches also reveal that the increase in quantity is not reflected equally in all productive sectors nor the egalitarian occupation of high hierarchical positions. The present study aimed to analyze how the presence of women, especially in leadership positions, has evolved at the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Postgraduate Education (CAPES) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) over the last 20 years. For these analyzes, surveys were conducted in the people management systems of the Brazilian Federal Public Administration. The initial hypothesis was that female attendance had increased in both the total number of female servants and in management and auxiliary positions, known as DAS in Brazil; however, evidence shows that women reduced overall agency presence, especially in the number of female Analysts occupying DAS positions. These results indicate that the misogyny observed in the academic sphere of the Brazilian National Postgraduate and Science, Technology, and Innovation systems are replicated in the politic-bureaucratic sphere that manages and sponsors these systems.

Obscene Textures: The Erotics of Disgust in the Writings of Ismat Chughtai

Abstract This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai through a materialist exploration into how the female body—with its erotic curvatures and grotesque protuberances, its sticky and viscous textures and fluids—becomes the focalized object of what the author terms the erotics of disgust. Chughtai is perhaps most famous for her being tried for obscenity in 1942 for her most famous short story, “The Quilt” (“Lihaaf”), which narrates a young girl’s encounter with the erotic relationship of a middle-class Muslim woman and her female servant. As Chughtai herself recounts, however, she was acquitted because the prosecution could never point to the exact words that were to be considered obscene. The author argues that we read Chughtai’s extraordinary inquiries into the imbrication of desire and disgust as the visceral sites of gender discipline, as the question of the “modern” Muslim female citizen subject hangs in the balance of an emergent Indian nationhood. The author offers a queer feminist critique of the traditional phenomenology of disgust by analyzing the codes of erotic texture produced out of histories of colonial hygiene and bourgeois sexual discipline in late colonial India.

Beyond the Home: Space and Agency in the Experiences of Female Service in Early Modern England

ABSTRACTThis article reconfigures our understanding of female service in early modern England by examining the roles and spaces female servants occupied not only within their employers homes but outside and within the wider community. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to categorise and analyse the spaces in which female servants were recorded in church court depositions from the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester between 1550 and 1650, it argues that female servants were not confined to the domestic sphere either in their work or their social interactions. And further, it shows that female servants' links to the wider community gave them power and agency – limited perhaps, but significant nonetheless ‐ in their dealings with their employers.

The “Irish” Female Servant in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood

This article examines two neo-Victorian novels by American writers—Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood (2000)—which “write back” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), respectively. Both novels ostensibly critique the socio-cultural inequalities of Victorian London, particularly for women, immigrants, and the working class, and the gender and class politics and structures of the original texts. However, as this article demonstrates, the presence of invented Irish female servants as key figures in these “re-visionary” narratives also undermines some aspects of this critique. Despite acting as gothic heroines, figures who traditionally uncover patriarchal abuses, these servant characters also facilitate their employers’ lives and negotiations of the supernatural (with varying degrees of success), while also themselves becoming associated with gothic monstrosity, via their extended associations with Irish-Catholic violence and barbarity on both sides of the Atlantic. This article therefore argues that Irish servant figures in neo-Victorian texts by American writers function as complex signifiers of pastness and barbarity, but also of assimilation and progressive modernization. Indeed, the more “Irish” the servant, the better equipped she will be to help her employer navigate the world of the supernatural.

Minor Characters and Sympathetic Service in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela

Critical analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) has focused too narrowly on the conflict between Pamela and Mr B as a power struggle between a lower-class, female servant and her master. I argue that we must extend our attention to Pamela’s relationships with the novel’s numerous minor characters. I connect Pamela’s understanding of these relationships to eighteenth-century moral philosophy, particularly as articulated by Adam Smith, to show that Richardson redefines power in the novel to include sympathetic service, a process in which narrative inspires an individual to engage sympathetically with others, and in turn to act beneficently on their behalf. In tracing Pamela’s desire to identify all characters, irrespective of class, as sympathetic servants throughout both Pamela and Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1742), and in taking Pamela’s self-identification as a servant even after her marriage to Mr B seriously, Pamela emerges from the novel as a moral philosopher who seeks to model an ideal community in which social relations are structured around reciprocal sympathetic service.

금관가야 여자 복식 재현과 일러스트 제안

This study was designed to suggest how to replicate costumes that women in Geumgwan Gaya wore by social status and provide women in costume illustration images. The process and results of the study are summarized as follows. The author classified the social status of Geumgwan Gaya’s women into four categories, such as the queen, woman of nobility, female servant, and ordinary woman. It is presumed that those women wore clothes such as Yu, Jangyu, Gun, and Go, like in the then other kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Shilla. The study assumed that the standard body size of the queen and noblewomen were bigger than female servants and ordinary women. Regardless of social status, however, this study used women in the ancient kingdom were 150cm in height, 82cm in chest width, and 88cm in hip circumference. For replicating the costume images of Geumgwan Gaya’s women, this study applied Jangyu to the queen and female servants and Yu to noble and ordinary women. For the queen, the study represented purple Jangyu with gold-plated patterns of Samyeopmun, Hwamun, Neunghyeongmun, Nakseungmun, and Samgakmun or with the same pattern in gold embroidery. For the noblewomen, Yu was reproduced celadon green color with silver-gilt patterns of Hwamun, Samgakjip Seonmun, Banwon Jeommun, and Wonhyeongmun or with the same patterns in silver embroidery. For the female servant, green Jangyu was replicated with patterns such as Hwamun and Wonhyeongmun. A solid brown Yu was replicated for ordinary women. As part of costume replication in this study, skirts were illustrated differently depending on social status. The study provided the images of pleated skirts with multi-colored stripes for the queen, non-pleated skirts with multi-colored stripes for noblewomen, pleated skirts without multi-colored stripes for female servants, and non-pleated skirts without the stripes for ordinary women. Colors used in the replicative illustration of multi-colored skirts for the queen were celadon green, orange, yellow, and white. Skirts for noblewomen were multi-colored with the combination of yellow-green, blue, brown, and white. Meanwhile, skirts for female servants and the ordinary women were replicative illustrated in pink and indigo.

Hired helpers at the nest: The association between life-cycle servants and net fertility in North Orkney, 1851-1911.

The presence of kin is often, but not always, associated with higher fertility in historical populations. However, the effect of other household members on fertility is less frequently studied. While not genetically related, life-cycle servants lived and worked alongside household members and may have provided assistance to reproducing families. Female servants in particular may have helped mothers with small children through direct help with childcare activities or by replacing the economic effort of mothers whose work was not compatible with childcare. This study examines the presence of servants in the households of married women of reproductive age to assess whether households with young children are more likely to also have servants. This study uses individual-level census data from North Orkney, Scotland (1851-1911) to investigate the relationship between the presence of servants in households and a measure of recent net marital fertility, the number of women's own-children under age 5, using logistic regression models. Households with young children were more likely to have a female, but not male, servant in the household after controlling for the effects of other possible helpers, including older children, mothers, and mothers-in-law. These findings are consistent with prior research that indicates the importance of female labor to smallholder agricultural households and suggests that female servants may have provided support to reproducing families. Life-cycle servants should be considered one component of biocultural reproduction in historical Northwest Europe. The use of hired help is not restricted to contemporary or elite groups.

Remembering the tatas: an oral history of the Tetouan elite about their female domestic slaves

Affluent families in Tetouan (Morocco) had female domestic servants from slave origins until well into the twentieth century. I present here a reconstruction of the trajectories and living conditions of those women, based on the recent memory of the slave-owning families themselves. This exercise raises different methodological challenges about the use of memory, while allowing us to present the transformations that the slavery system underwent in colonial Morocco. The position of female domestic servants was diverse and paradoxical, since in many cases they achieved a degree of closeness with the families, while at the same time finding themselves under a system of class and gender domination.

CHILDREN OF SERVANTS IN RUSSIA IN THE MID-19TH – THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

In this article, based on the historical and anthropological approach, we study the possibilities of implementing the maternal role of female servants in Russia at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. Based on a wide source base, represented by reports of various societies, court cases, reports of Zemstvo and public congresses, etc., the author analyses the extent to which servants had the «right to a family», which was the reason for the desire or unwillingness to have a child, the possibility of raising children. Using concrete examples, the study shows that most of the servants’ children were illegitimate and unwanted. Very often, because of the fear of dismissal and loss of means of subsistence, the servants had to get rid of the child. The author comes to the conclusion that the options for the development of the mother-child relationship were reduced to «getting rid» of the child by abortion, infanticide, dumping it in an orphanage; giving it to relatives or public organisations for upbringing; providing the child to itself. The example of servants’ children shows that they were forced to grow up early, and the resulting «freedom», in most cases, was realised in deviant behaviour. By the end of the 19th century the fate of street children had become a problem that caused serious concern not only for Russian pedagogues and hygienists, but also for the broad circles of Russian society.

“Powerless power”: The status of female domestic workers in Russia in the second half of the 19th - early 20th century

The proposed article investigates the specifics of social status of urban female domestic servants in post-reform Russia. On the basis of a wide range of sources, including statistical materials, printed press, household manuals and ego-documents, the author distinguishes between two groups in this category of population that were fundamentally different in their status in the master’s family. In the post-reform period in Russia, the work of maidservants was not standardized, there were no guarantees from hirers regarding both working conditions and cases of dismissal and disability. Widespread sexual harassment and abuse seriously worsened the position of maidservants. A significant influx of peasant girls, who considered themselves fully prepared for the work of domestic servants, into the city, created a gigantic supply At the same time, the overwhelming majority of the job seekers did not have any idea about the activities that they were to carry out. Making endless blunders, the clumsy peasant girl acquired professional skills and learned to live in the master’s family, suffering insults and harassment and working hard only to avoid being kicked out. As a result, those girls who had been able to endure several years of torment, acquired not only professional skills, but were trained to live in the city, to use their position to earn money, to protect themselves from encroachment, or to use their attractiveness as a weapon. With the growth of education of female peasant youth, their increasing familiarity with judicial institutions, and the intensification of the activities of various organizations involved in helping those women with education and employment, female domestic servants felt more secure and ready to defend their rights. As a result, despite the seemingly gigantic supply, it was, in fact, extremely difficult to find a suitable maidservant for the household. The choice available to the owners was limited to two options - a docile slouch, or a maid knowing her worth and requiring consideration of her interests.

Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants, Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

ABSTRACTFar from being a trivial detail, clothes fundamentally define who we are and how we are perceived by others. Drawing on a large sample of French and British servants’ memoirs, this article explores how dress served a crucial but contrasting role in the way French and British servants articulated their identities within and outside the home between 1900 and 1939. It argues that servants’ dress was deeply linked to the nature of the occupation in each country and the structure of their respective female labour markets.

Kierkegaard wobec problemu ukrycia Boga

More than a few contemporary analytical philosophers of religion have tried to answer the atheistic argument from hiddenness presented in 1993 by John L. Schellenberg. In the paper the author focuses on the objections raised by Søren Kierkegaard with respect to the concept of faith that is displayed in Schellenberg’s philosophy of religion. The insight from the author living 150 years before the current debate allows us to notice the premises of the hiddenness argument that are commonly overlooked. One can, i.e. suppose that Kierkegaard would cast doubt on Schellenberg’s claim that the best evidence allowing the development of a mutual relationship between God and the human being is an experience of an accepting presence of God in human consciousness. Kierkegaard argues in his works that only the hiddenness of God guarantees a free and a selfless relationship between men and God. He shows this in a colourful language of metaphors in which he compares faith to conjugal love; a human life to an exam and a relationship between God and the human being to a relationship between a king and a female servant. This way of reasoning reveals the importance of the role of the images of God in the reflections of philosophers tackling the hiddenness argument.

Évelyne, Scenes, and Rosalie

Évelyne, Scenes, and Rosalie Renée Larrier In December 2004, on a break from the African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches conference in Paris, I browsed through the Musée Dapper bookstore (which, unfortunately, closed in 2017). A brightly colored book cover featuring a regal black woman in profile and a red detachable band proclaiming the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone award caught my eye. It was Évelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l’Infâme, which I devoured that very night.1 What a powerful introduction to her work! It is significant that Philippe Davaine’s artistic rendering depicts narrator Lisette as a close-cropped, natural-hair wearing woman who completely dominates the sailing ship in the background, intimating that she and her ancestors survived the Middle Passage and Atlantic slavery. That a small portrait of Trouillot graces the upper left-hand corner of the back of the book articulates, complements, and reinforces that message, linking the two women to and through centuries of history in a similar way that the knotted cord bonds Brigitte to Lisette. Likewise, Trouillot’s oeuvre connects her to predecessor Marie Vieux Chauvet, contemporary Marie-Célie Agnant, and successor Edwidge Danticat, who wrote the foreword to M. A. Salvadon’s translation The Infamous Rosalie.2 While these Haitian-born writers have all spent years away from the island nation, Trouillot was the only one to return definitively, so that her literary identity has never been debated. Nevertheless, these writers are particularly mindful about representing Haitian women’s and girls’ experiences, and accordingly, creating women-centered texts. Trouillot’s novels, short stories, plays, and children’s and young people’s literature in French and Creole, most of which are published in Port-au-Prince and available abroad, privilege multigenerational relationships with political, social, historical, and gender resonances. [End Page 3] Fast forward to October 2017, to Scenes at 20: Inspirations, Riffs, and Reverberations, the two-day symposium at Rutgers University celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self -Making in Nineteenth-Century America.3 Listening to the presenters, I began to reflect on the ways in which Rosalie and Scenes are in dialogue, noting that the similarities extended beyond the title of Hartman’s brilliant, pioneering scholarly study. Motivated to explore further, I revisited both texts, concluding that Rosalie l’Infâme, a novel set in mid-eighteenth century colonial Saint-Domingue, could be read in the context of Hartman’s historical analysis of the American South, where slavery also prevailed. Examining the various forms of domination in daily life, a phenomenon she calls the “terror of the mundane and quotidian,”4 Hartman focuses in particular on covert performances of power, those that involve sexuality, such as interactions between white men and enslaved women that range from coercive arrangements to rape; questions of subjectivity and agency; and resistance and freedom. In Rosalie, the enslaved women adopt various strategies to survive that involve exchanging their bodies for a semblance or measure of agency: Gracieuse with Fayot to avoid working in the fields; Clarisse and Louise to free their children. Brigitte’s is a special case. Although she finally succumbs to Montreuil’s pressure, after his repeated threats and having her niece Ayouba beaten twice, she does achieve agency by sparing others, some of whom are not related to her. In addition to later negotiating the escape of her sister Charlotte and Ayouba, Brigitte uses her medical knowledge not only to abort her three fetuses, but to kill sixty-nine newborns in order to save them from a life of enslavement, her declared mission. In addition, certain scenes reconstruct Hartman’s notion of the simultaneous performance of pleasure and pain. One such incident takes place on the slave ship Rosalie during the Middle Passage. While the white sailors are amused at a Hausa woman dancing to the beat of a drum, the African captives understand that hers is a dance of death, and, indeed, she jumps into the sea. Another example is the spectacle of Sarah parading her stylishly dressed female servants through the town market, masking the physical violence...

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Ralph the Bailiff ”: Speaking Truth to Madness

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Ralph the Bailiff ”: Speaking Truth to Madness Brittany Roberts (bio) Mary elizabeth braddon’s 1861 short story “Ralph the Bailiff ”1 offers an early example of how accusations about women’s mental health might be weaponized as a way of protecting and preserving power and status at a time when social hierarchies were becoming increasingly unstable. Like Braddon’s most popular novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, “Ralph the Bailiff ” presents marriage as a social convention that can easily be manipulated by the female servant class to climb the social ladder in a way not otherwise permitted by nineteenth-century British custom. Unlike the novel, however, the perpetrator of the “crime” in this story ends up with money, freedom, and a blemish-free name while her affluent husband ends up in the grave. Dudley Carleon, the gentleman farmer who marries his housekeeper, Martha, is not a sympathetic victim, as the marriage is motivated by his need to cover up his role in his older brother’s murder by buying her and her brother Ralph’s silence. Free from debt with his newfound fortune, Dudley solicits the hand of young, beautiful Jenny Trevor, an orphan with six thousand pounds, who has no idea that her marriage proposal is coming from a murderer and would-be bigamist and will put her fortune—and ultimately her life—in jeopardy. The only person who can save Jenny from a lifetime of unforeseen misery is her best friend, Agnes, who, Dudley warns, “is a madwoman; whatever she says to you” (25). Preventing the ill-fated marriage between Dudley and Jenny thus seems to hinge on one very important question: can women be believed? Jenny, unfortunately, believes Dudley, and, in turn, will later learn first-hand how easy it is to discredit a woman [End Page 166] by questioning her mental stability. In this sensational short story, believing women has much to do with what they are believed to be and little to do with what they say. Appearance and truth are frequently at odds in sensation fiction, and here, the “shocking reveal” is not that the women are mad, but that they are perfectly sane. “Ralph the Bailiff ” highlights the tendency to label as “madness” any criticism of the status quo that women might make, while also cautioning that such labels are destructive to justice and truth. Braddon’s “fair-haired demon of modern fiction,” Lucy Audley, will raise similar concerns when Lady Audley’s Secret is published the following year (Oliphant 263). Indeed, Lady Audley’s confession that she has killed her husband simply because she is a “madwoman” has persisted as a source of both suspicion and frustration for feminist recovery scholars, as it pathologizes women’s defiance and under-cuts what seems like a perfectly “sane” desire to rise in a society where few opportunities to do so were available to women. For example, Jill Matus has famously argued that this final revelation in a story punctuated with thrilling “reveals” actually functions as a “cover-up,” serving instead “to displace the economic and class issues already raised in the novel and to deflect their uncomfortable implications” (334).2 Braddon evidently recognized how madness could be used as a cover-up because “Ralph the Bailiff,” published just one year before the novel, operates on precisely that premise: the only character with the power to implicate a “good man” in a plot of unfathomable wickedness is one whom he has, conveniently, labelled a “madwoman.” Dennis Denisoff has remarked on short fiction’s relative “invisibility” as a literary form despite its widespread availability in nineteenth-century Britain, arguing that it was “consumed by millions from all classes, age groups, and literacy levels,” which ultimately made it “so common as to be invisible” (17). While the subversive potential afforded by such invisibility is a relatively new source of inquiry for scholars of Victorian short stories, it is something Victorian writers, especially women, may have understood all too well. In this case, Braddon’s short story exposes how women are often silenced through pathologization, a tendency to which she herself will later conform in her highly “visible” sensation novel. As supposed “filler material...

Het Antwerpse en Brusselse rekruteringsgebied voor buitenlandse dienstmeiden (1850-1910)

Historians have observed that the recruitment areas of several nineteenth-century European service cities expanded beyond the cities’ hinterland. This development is inextricably connected to the democratisation of long-distance migration and the mobility transition in this period. As several European cities were located close to each other, the question arises how these cities influenced each other’s recruitment areas. This article focuses on the recruitment areas for foreign female domestic servants of Antwerp and Brussels between 1850 and 1910. The local foreigners’ files of both cities not only provide information on the birth place of each foreigner who entered the city but also on the place of departure, which allows for a better reconstruction of urban recruitment areas than previously used source material. The hypothesis is that the recruitment areas of both cities gradually came to overlap as a consequence of the short distance and many transport links between the two cities, the high degree of mobility of servants, and the similarities in the domestic service labour market of both cities.

The sanctuary of Zeus Krezimos in Metropolis in Ionia

The sacred site of Zeus Krezimos, just in front of the rocky part of the northern slope of the Metropolis acropolis, is considered to be the first cult center discovered in the ancient city. Although the exact location of the cult center of Ares, the god of the city, is unknown, it is thought to be on the acropolis in an exceptional situation. The only cult centers older than dedicated to Ares are the sacred caves of the Mother Goddess, whose name was given to the city. In these sacred caves located in Uyuzdere, 5 km outside the city, the Mother Goddess was worshiped until the advent of Christianity. During the excavation consequent upon the stylobate blocks discovered in 2015, in excavations at the sacred site of Zeus Krezimos, the discovery of an inscribed columns, a part of an altar and a sculpture base caused an excitement. It is not yet certain whether the columns had capitals. The inscribed sections on the column drums surrounding the courtyard are arranged in a way to face the courtyard. The base diameter of the columns erected on the surface of the stylobate extends out at some places, suggesting the possibility of a second function. The courtyard is covered in local limestone slabs. As a result of a trench opened in this area, it was understood that the floor was in-filled with rubble and marble pieces. In addition, rooms that were thought to have been used in cult ceremonies in the northern and eastern parts of the sanctuary, which is located behind the columns, were uncovered. Further, a certain area of the main rock was cut in a regular fashion and the fact that this is interconnected with the architectural structure is an example of a construction technique that has not been found elsewhere in Metropolis to date. As a result of the studies conducted on the inscriptions, it was understood that this area was a cult area dedicated to Zeus Krezimos. This cult area was known to exist at Metropolis but its exact location was unknown. The discovery of the Zeus Krezimos cult area in Metropolis is of great importance, inasmuch as the cults of Hera and Ares worshipped in Metropolis, which are also known from inscriptions but their locations have not yet been found. The fact that this sacred area was built right in front of a large rocky area and integrated with the rock also shows the cult at Metropolis was a continuation of the ancient tradition in Anatolia of worshiping the gods and goddesses on mountains and in rocky high lands. In studies conducted on the inscriptions, this cult was also understood to have had a connection with water due to the hydrobaphos attribute recorded of one of the civil servants working in the cult. This provides us with clues about a ceremonial ritual associated with rocks and the spring water from them. Today, although there is no water source in this rocky area, it is thought that such a source of water emerged from the rocky area at the time when the cults were still active. Consequently, the cult with Zeus Krezimos epithet is thought to have been a local cult associated with fertility and abundance. The fact that the Zeus Krezimos cult was specific to Metropolis is supported by the epigraphic evidence. The inscribed column drums in the sacred area carry lists of the names of the priests serving here. In past years, inscribed column drums relating to the Ares cult known to exist in the city were found, and on these drums the name lists of people serving in the cult area as well as those in the sanctuary of Zeus Krezimos were included. The cult of Zeus Krezimos was behind that of Ares in the hierarchy, but nevertheless families were active in it, those whose family heads were ambitious for themselves and their relatives put them into positions within the cult. There existed personal connections to other cults, some at the level of the priests, more often on the level of the Odrogos. The women of the families – with the function of priestess, of the hydrobaphos and the female servant – were subordinate, but still prominent. Also in this cult no wife was allowed in the position of the priestess. The priest “Hermas” and the hydrobaphos are propria of the cult.