Golden Fleece hangs from an apple tree. Jason's helper in the Athenian vase-paintings is not Medea— who had a history in Athens as the opponent of Theseus— but Athena. The very early origin of the myth in preliterate times means that during the more than a millennium when it was to some degree part of the fabric of culture, its perceived significance likely passed through numerous developments. Several euhemeristic attempts to interpret the Golden Fleece "realistically" as reflecting some physical cultural object or alleged historical practice have been made. For example, in the 20th century, some scholars suggested that the story of
Operation Golden Fleece Operation Golden Fleece The Operation Golden Fleece () was a non-combatant evacuation operation carried out by the Hellenic Navy in August 1993 to evacuate over 1,000 native Greeks from Georgia fleeing the War in Abkhazia to Greece. After World War II, ethnic Greeks of the Abkhaz ASSR were deported on Joseph Stalin's order in 1949-1950. They were allowed to return in the late 1950s, however their number never reached pre-deportation level. Most of the Greeks fled Abkhazia (mostly to Greece and Russia) during and after the 1992-1993 war so that their number dropped from 14,664 in 1989 to just 1,486