Sun Temples, and a Mistaken Myth

In the Andes the sunflower was associated with the sun and, by some early Spanish accounts, worn in gold by the priestesses of the Inca sun temples, reports later writers have treated with caution. The plant's heliotropism drew to it the Greek myth of Clytie, the water-nymph who pined for the sun-god and was rooted into a flower that forever turns to follow him; Ovid tells the tale of a heliotrope or violet, and it was only later that the New World sunflower, unknown to the ancients, inherited the story. As a modern emblem the sunflower stands for adoration, loyalty and the turning of the soul toward light, and it has been adopted as a sign of several secular causes.

The sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine and one of the country's principal export crops, the source of a large share of the world's sunflower oil, and the flower has taken on an additional, current layer of meaning as an emblem of Ukrainian identity and resilience since 2022, a modern political and agricultural association layered onto the much older solar symbolism recorded above rather than replacing it. The flower's modern fame owes as much to art as to agriculture: Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers series, painted in 1888 and 1889, made the flower an icon of modern painting, independent of either its Andean solar associations or its more recent role as a Ukrainian national emblem.