Katina's Deste Cards

Thank you, Elena, for buying the last Deste set in Istanbul and then giving it away in our Lenormand Study Group! ♥ I was the lucky winner! The set has traveled a long way from Turkey to the Pacific NW U.S.A.

The beautiful Deste cards, by Mara Meimaridi, have 65 cards. The deck has elements of Lenormand in it, which is why Elena brought it to the group. 

So far, I'm enjoying the cards by Katina, a famous sibyl from Izmir. Like many in the group, I was unaware of these, so I'm just beginning to explore them.

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My first thought was obvious, to use Deste for Lenormand readings, since it has many similar cards. I quickly found out that it was missing 4 essential Lenormand cards (Bear, Stork, Clover & Lily).

The deck came with two blank cards so I could use those to help fill the missing symbols and use Opium for Lily, and maybe another card for Stork. 

The more I examined the cards the more interested I was about learning the other non-Lenormand cards in the deck.

​I must say, it was a hard task indeed as I don't read Turkish or Greek. (Greek is the language of the original edition...the PDF explaining the deck can be downloaded from Mara's website.) 

I met Chris last week, a Greek man on YouTube, who had 2 short videos about Katina's Deste cards. One video shows a 13 card spread video response. The other is a short video sharing some information on Deste. 

I asked him some questions and he was most generous to make two more videos sharing his wisdom about the cards. One explaining the differences between the Greek and Turkish editions.

And, one longer video (below) showing ALL of the cards describing their upright meanings, along with the reversed meanings, and additional advice about how to use the cards.

An abundance of information, more than I could ever hope for about these beautiful and mysterious cards.

Chris said: "According to the writer, who is the niece of Katina, Deste has its roots from around 600BC. This deck is very old and through the years cards and meaning were added and left out. The original deck Mara Meimaridi owns is very old, so  they recreated the deck, used new images but the cards and their meanings are the same ones since 1938, when the last additions and changes were made."

Chris's 13 card spread before I knew you didn't use the Spirit/Ttzan cards in your reading. These are advice cards. You choose one of the four blindly to get advice from that particular Spirit card about the situation. I love how they are meant to be read after the reading as advice.

Thank you, Chris, I look forward to more videos about how you read with them. And, thank you so much, Elena, for shipping this set to me!