Golden Fleece the Twelve Olympians. The golden fleece was defended by bulls with hoofs of brass and breath of fire. It was also guarded by a never sleeping dragon with teeth which could become soldiers when planted in the ground. The dragon was at the foot of the tree on which the fleece was placed. Pindar employed the quest for the Golden Fleece in his Fourth Pythian Ode (written in 462 BCE), though the fleece is not in the foreground. When Aeetes challenges Jason to yoke the fire-breathing bulls, the fleece is the prize: "Let the King do this, the captain 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