They say that this happened a very long time ago. Then in the country of the Aztecs there lived a charming little girl with a beautiful name - Xochitl. In the Aztec language it meant "flower".
The girl adored the sun and admired it from dawn to dusk. When the sun set in the evening, she sadly walked home, living the dream that tomorrow she would see him again.
It so happened that for a whole year the sun appeared every day, and not once, not for a moment did the clouds cover it. For Xochitl this was incredible happiness.
However, what was a joy for her turned into a terrible disaster for the maize crops: the stems stopped stretching upward and the cobs did not grow heavier. In addition, beans and peppers stopped growing. Without rain, all the plants suffered; from thirst they drooped to the very ground.
The drought left the fields barren. People began to die from hunger.
The Aztecs prayed to the gods daily, asking for rain. Seeing all this, Xochitl understood why people endure suffering and hunger. To cause rain, she went to the temple of Tonatiuh, the sun god, and turned to him with a prayer. She asked him to hide behind the clouds and save her people.
The little girl's prayer reached the sun god Tonatiuh. And now the whole sky was covered with a carpet of clouds. The long-awaited rain came. So much water poured out that the completely bent maize began to rise merrily and all its cobs were swollen with large, full-bodied grains.
Everyone around was filled with joy. Only poor Xochitl was sad: she suffered without the sun she loved so much. Without him, she slowly faded away, but then a bright ray broke through the clouds and ordered Xochitl to go to the sacred village, where the sun never disappears, where flowers always bloom. There she will be called not Xochitl, but Xochitl-Tonatiu (which in Aztec means “flower of the sun”).
So the lovely girl turned into a beautiful flower of sunny color, with a dark core - just like her hair and eyes. Every day this flower opens towards the sun at dawn and turns behind it on its daily journey across the sky until sunset...
From that time on, at the beginning of autumn, these golden flowers begin to bloom in all fields, and especially maize fields. The Indians affectionately call them Xochitl-tonatiu, which means... sunflower.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru