Author: P. Molnar, Word Count: 1741
Featured in Midsummer Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – Summer 2026
That evening, bike frame propped against his pelvis and one of his hands, he stood on the summit of the low-lying hill, at the northern edge of the village.
Though the surrounding area was a lowland, it was not a lowland of endless flat ground, far as the eye could see, but a lowland of many gently rising hill slopes, many subtle and wide hillocks. Interspersed with flatter expanses, where you could observe things at great distances. The mountains in the west included.
It was the 21st of June, the day of the summer solstice. Midsummer. And it was some time after 9:00 PM local time. The sun was setting on the horizon, behind the long mountain range to the west. The longest day of the year was nearing its end.
It always felt so dramatic, when you bothered to think about the details. On the 21st of December, when days were shortest, you saw a shift towards the day’s length increasing once again. For six months, until the 21st of June, daylight recovered its strength, only to then start losing it again. Right at the start of summer proper. Even in his younger years, he found that an interesting paradox.
He had always regarded people’s relationship with the Sun to be fraught with various oddities and… anxieties. Anxieties human beings were often uncomfortable admitting. Anxieties that might feel downright silly, especially in the modern day, but anxieties that nevertheless existed. Anxieties related to the Sun and the solstices. Shared among members of the whole human species, but anxieties that were also individual. Idiosyncratic. Sometimes almost random and inexplicable.
Even when he was a child, when he couldn’t put it into specific words, words tempered by years of added learning and added experience, he felt that people have a surprising amount of anxieties about the Sun, and about the length of night and day. He was no exception. The days getting shorter after the 21st of June had also bothered his mind.
Maybe there was some method to the madness. Obvious reasons why someone would demand „Don’t go, Sun ! Why must the days get shorter again…“, and other, rather pompous expressions of personal discomfort. But was it any wonder ? Human eyesight in the dark, in the night, was fairly limited. It wasn’t much to write home about, even when you spent some time adjusting your eyes to the dark. Human eyes, like with other great apes, preferred the comforts of daylight and colours.
Human minds followed suit. Like with all facets of evolution, you had to work with what you had. Throughout all of human history and culture, fear of the dark, and the idea of night as foreboding, or a time of sleepy rest, reflected the old human discomfort over longer evening and nights.
When he was a child, he had also discovered within himself a growing interest in history, and eventually, also archaeology. The abyss of time, the notion that society has developed and not stood still for centuries or millennia, and the notion he’s inhabiting just one of the most recent versions of the world, had opened his mind to many new things. To things he couldn’t have expected, or have only faintly guesses, as a somewhat younger child.
Back in the spring of 1999, there was an archaeological discovery on this same hill. Somewhat below the summit, next to the field road leading up the subtly rising slope. The laying of a local gas pipeline had unearthed an inhabited location that went back not only centuries, but even several millennia. No surprise, as several of the villages in the area were famous for all manner of archaeological finds. Some among the finest Copper Age and Bronze Age finds in the country.
Still a kid, he could barely hide his interest in what the archaeologists could find on the slope. Research of the digsite had revealed post holes from a small 13th century house, and below it, layers with dwellings from the late Stone Age or Copper Age, and some finds from the Bronze Age. They had even found remains of an earth oven built into the prehistoric hovel. A novel find in the archaeological record of the region. The summit of the hill was uninhabited today, the only nearby surroundings not dedicated to agriculture was the newer village cemetery, on the southern side of the wide summit.
Whatever motivated people of ages past to inhabit that particular location, a literal stone’s throw away from the north end of the village, the defensive potential of the place seemed quite obvious. No palisade, earthworks, hill fort or castle had ever been discovered in the village and its surrounding area. Not at this location just north north of the cemetery, nor anywhere else. Well, even a gentle hill can provide some sense of safety and defence…
Or was the motivation of the bygone locals more prosaic than living at a place with a good lookout over the area ? Were people who lived here in ages past, also watching the Sun set on the longest day of the year, at midsummer ?
By the time he was visiting high school, he had already developed a certain begrudging respect for the land around him and even all the changes it underwent over the ages. Changes that he saw only a fraction, many changes that he could’ve only guessed. He had also developed some unofficial annual habits, over the years. Not rituals taken overly seriously, rituals often skipped due to various reasons, but ones that had still left lasting memories within his mind.
It might have happened already during the earliest year of high school. Likely even before setting foot in high school for the first time. Regardless of when exactly it had happened, years ago, he had a vivid memory of the event. A vivid memory of standing at the summit of this exact same hill, looking towards the exact same mountain range… watching the sun set on the 21st of June.
Watching the sun set on the longest day of the year, the last sliver of that bright disk slipping behind the mountains in the west, in what felt like the closing night of a theatrical run that began just before Christmas.
From now on, for another six months, days will only get shorter, he had thought back then, and many, many times since then. He often thought about the implications. For example, less time available to go for a hiking trip that would demand a whole day, or most of the day. Simple mathematics. Less hours of daylight, less time available for a more time-consuming hike.
People, even very charitable people, often don’t like being limited, or feeling they’re being limited. Even by something as natural as the length of day getting shorter. „Interfering“ with a person’s plans. Shameful as it would be to admit it, perhaps this was one of the old Sun-related anxieties of humans.
Ever since that one bit of much-remembered sunset gazing, well over twenty years ago, he had done a similar thing only rarely. Irregularly. Very irregularly. Not every year. Mostly unplanned, a few times. Already in the days of that vivid, downright foundational memory of a sunset on the 21st of June, twenty years ago, he had pondered about people’s solar anxieties after the summer solstice.
It would be easy, he thought, to give into the idea that „this is it“. There’s going to be less day and more night, almost until Christmas, until the winter solstice shortly before the holidays in December. That I or anyone else should be all glum about it. Or conflicted, or anxious. Honestly, I shouldn’t be.
This is just another part of annual natural cycle. Just like the seasons. The 22nd of June might be the second longest day of the year, from the other side, but it’s a long day, and so are the days beyond it. Plenty of time in each day to fill with meaningful work, meaningful thought, meaningful effort.
The people back in the Chalcolithic or the Bronze Age put so much stock into appeasing the solar deity (or deities ?). Many cultures from around the world had also created similar traditions. But the Sun was indefferent. The Sun, crucial as it was to the Solar System, the Earth and all life on Earth, was still just another part of nature. It couldn’t care less whether the human species worshipped it, prayed to it, even sacrificed to it. It didn’t care whether they thought the occassional eclipse was someone or something trying to devour or steal away the Sun.
The Sun just was. That’s all it needed to be. Crucial to the entire planet, essential to all life and all of civilization, but not any more supernatural or magical than Mars or Venus or some distant moon of Neptune, or icy planetoid in the Kuiper Belt.
He had long considered history and archaeology to be humbling scientific disciplines. Paleontology and astronomy even moreso. They had dethroned any notions of humans having any inherently privileged place in the universe. But they had not dethroned human dignity and the capacity for good humans carried within them.
Humans had arguably shown folly when they worshipped individual parts of nature, including the Sun, or the material world in general. Folly when they equated worshipping the Sun as a guarantee of a good harvest or good luck. Folly when they conflated the dubious, deify-ed status of the Sun, giving themselves or others questionable, bombastic monikers, such as „The Sun King“. Folly, when bygone empires and states of old threw around phrases like „finding a place for us under the sun“. As if the Sun didn’t want to share its life-giving solar energy with everyone, around the whole planet, day by day.
Was it any wonder that people seemed to have largelly invented their age-old solar anxieties ?
The world won’t be lesser and the days won’t provide fewer opportunities just because the longest day concludes and we pass the summer solstice. There was no time for solar elegies nor anxieties.
After he concluded watching the sunset, he turned the bike around, „got back in the saddle“ and pedalled downhill. He reached the end of the field road and took a turn onto the paved tarmac of the main road. Heading to the village, home, he was looking forward to tomorrow, the 22nd of June.
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