Angelopoulos, who was himself killed by a motorcycle while crossing a street in Piraeus in 2012, knew the truth. The road does not lead home. The road is the home. And the beekeeper is not a farmer. He is a priest of a dead god, performing the sacrament of pollination for an audience of stones.

Halfway through the odyssey, Spyros picks up a hitchhiker—a young, anarchic runaway played by a preternaturally feral Nastassja Kinski. She has no name, or rather, she refuses the one she was given. She is hunger. She is chaos. She is the anti-honey.

Angelopoulos frames Greece not as a postcard of white-washed splendor, but as a vast, exhausted cemetery of myth. The bees are the only ones still working. The humans are ghosts waiting for a script.

In apiculture, if you lose the queen, the hive implodes. The literalizes this: the man and the hive are one organism. As the bees die (confused, freezing, or attacking each other), Spyros collapses. The girl watches him die on the floor of the depot, covered in the corpses of his own swarm.