Gerana,[a] sometimes also called Oenoe,[b] is a queen of the Pygmy folk in Greek mythology, who incurred the wrath of the goddess Hera and was subsequently turned into a bird bearing her name, the crane.

[3] According to Antoninus Liberalis, who attributes the story to the Hellenistic writer Boeus, who authored the lost poem Ornithogony (or the "birth of the birds"),[4] she was born to the Pygmies, a very beautiful but graceless girl who shunned the worship of Hera and Artemis.

[13][14] The opening six lines of the third book of the eight-century BC epic poem the Iliad implies that Gerana's tale, or at least some version of it, might had been known as early as Homer.

[15][16] According to Russian philologist Irina V. Shtal an earlier–now lost–epic poem called the Geranomachia ("battle against the cranes"), one of the many light-hearted parodies of the Iliad written in ancient times,[17] was erroneously attributed to Homer in antiquity.

Fontenrose notes that they are both beautiful queens connected to Africa who enrage Hera, undergo transformation as punishment at her hands and are deprived of their children.