"In so far as she has affected the traditions of the Church, a male deity, S. Demetrius, has in general superseded [Demeter]. Under the title of στερεανός, 'belonging to the dry land,' he has in most districts taken over the patronage of agriculture; while his inherited interest in marriage receives testimony from the number of weddings celebrated, especially in the agricultural districts, on his day. But at Eleusis, the old home of Demeter's most sacred rites, the people, it seems, would not brook the substitution of a male saint for their goddess, and yielded to ecclesiastical influence only so far as to create for themselves a saint Demetra (η αγία Δήμητρα) entirely unknown elsewhere and never canonised. Further, in open defiance of an iconoclastic Church, they retained an old statue of Demeter, and merely prefixing the title 'saint' to the name of their cherished goddess, continued to worship her as before. The statue was regularly crowned with garlands of flowers in the avowed hope of obtaining good harvests, and without doubt prayer was made before it as now before the pictures of canonical saints. This state of things continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, in 1801, two Englishmen, named Clarke and Cripps, armed by the Turkish authorities with a license to plunder, perpetrated an act unenviably like that of Verres at Enna, and in spite of a riot among the peasants of Eleusis removed by force the venerable marble ; and that which was the visible form of the great goddess on whose presence and goodwill had depended from immemorial ages the fertility of the Thriasian plain is now a little-regarded object catalogued as "No. xiv, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, (much mutilated)." — Lawson, John Cuthbert (1910). Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals, p. 79–80.
For more recent scholarship see Cosmopoulos, Michael B. (2015). Bronze Age Eleusis and the Origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries, p. 35–36.
Fitzwilliam Museum; official website:
In 1801 the Cambridge professor E. D. Clarke visited the village of Eleusis near Athens, once the site of an important sanctuary dedicated to Demeter, the Greek goddess of corn and fertility. He observed this statue 'in the midst of a heap of dung, buried as high as the neck', and went on to explain that 'the inhabitants of the village still regard [it] with a very high degree of veneration. They attributed to its presence the fertility of the land, and it was for this reason that they heaped around it the manure intended for their fields.' [...] Recognising the quality and importance of this statue, Clarke decided to remove it. He winched the statue out of its dungy bed and shipped it to England. But it did not travel willingly: the ship carrying the caryatid, and other items collected by Clarke, sank off Beachy Head on the south coast of England (though most of the pieces were later salvaged).