How Hedymeles, a Dark Maltese Fairytale, Is Saving Bees and Memories

**Hedymeles: A Fairytale for Adults That’s Enchanting Malta’s Creative Scene**

In a country where Baroque facades meet TikTok trends, a new hybrid creature has landed: *Hedymeles*, a limited-edition art-and-text volume that reads like a Brothers Grimm tale after three shots of local honey liquor. The project—half illuminated manuscript, half graphic novel—was quietly launched last month at Splendid, the 17th-century palazzo-turned-cultural-hub in Valletta. By the end of the first week the print run of 500 had sold out, Instagram was awash with #HedymelesMalta posts, and the national library had opened a waiting list for the second pressing. In short, a fairytale for adults is fast becoming a Maltese cultural phenomenon.

The brainchild of Gozitan illustrator Ramona Depares and Anglo-Maltese poet Theo Sant, *Hedymeles* follows a nameless bee-keeper who barters jars of amber honey for lost memories. Each chapter is printed on a different weight of paper—thick, creamy stock for summer, translucent vellum for winter—so the book literally feels heavier as the protagonist forgets who he is. Sant’s text slips between English and Maltese the way elderly neighbours switch codes at the village grocer; Depares’ illustrations drip with pollen-yellows and limestone-greys that anyone who has walked the Dingli cliffs at dusk will instantly recognise.

Why has it struck such a nerve? Because Malta is experiencing a moment of collective soul-searching. The post-COVID tourism rebound, the grey-listing, the construction cranes stalking every skyline: islanders are asking what should be kept and what can be affordably lost. *Hedymeles* lands squarely in that anxiety, packaging it as something you can hold at arm’s length yet still smell the beeswax.

“Fairytales let us rehearse fear in miniature,” Depares tells me over a qassatat in a busy Valletta café. “If we can mourn a fictional bee-keeper’s vanishing identity, maybe we can also mourn the real rubble walls being bulldozed outside Żejtun.” Sant nods: “We wanted adult readers to feel the same disorientation kids feel when a witch bakes children into bread. Except here the witch is speculative development and the oven is Airbnb.”

The timing is uncanny. Just as *Hedymeles* hit shelves, Heritage Malta announced a call for volunteers to help catalogue traditional apiaries in the northwest—many abandoned since EU accession funnelled young farmers into office jobs. Suddenly bee-keeping, that most ancient of Maltese practices, is trending among twenty-somethings who discovered it via a dark little fable. Sales of local honey at farmers’ markets have spiked 18 %, according to AgriMalta, and the Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi has scheduled a series of beginner bee-keeping workshops that sold out in 24 hours.

Local bookshops are capitalising too. “We’ve re-arranged the front tables,” says Stephanie Azzopardi of Sapienza’s. “Fairytales now sit next to politics and environment. Customers say they never thought to look for *Ġaħan* or *The Giant of Qolla l-Bajda* as adult reading until *Hedymeles* blurred the line.” Even the Church has weighed in: the Augustinian friars at Rabat hosted a seminar titled “Storytelling and Spirituality in a Secular Age,” using Depares’ honeycomb motifs as discussion prompts.

The ripple effects are reaching Gozo, where artisanal press Għanja has pledged to reprint *Il-Belliegħa*, a 1934 children’s classic, on similarly tactile paper. Meanwhile, the Valletta Design Cluster is piloting a six-week course on “narrative craftsmanship,” teaching bookbinders to incorporate local limestone dust into covers—literally making the island’s skin part of every story.

But perhaps the sweetest outcome is personal. One evening I visit the author duo at their pop-up studio in a converted bakery in Bormla. A couple in their seventies knocks, clutching a jar of honey from their Ta’ Xbiex rooftop hive. “We read your book,” the husband says, voice cracking. “We’re giving our memories back to the bees while we still know who we are.” He offers the jar like a relic. Depares and Sant accept, eyes shining. For a moment the only sound is the whirr of the old dough-mixer repurposed as a printing press—Malta’s past and future spinning in tandem.

*Hedymeles* may be a fairytale, but its sting is real. And in a country racing to reinvent itself, that gentle ache might be the most honest guide we have.