Cracking Greek Easter: red eggs, euphoria and a touch of madness

Greek Easter service at Ayios Dimitrios, Koroni, Messinia

WHEN I think of Easter in Greece, I think of dyed red eggs, euphoria and feasting. I also think of mutant incense, terrier rebellion and ‘Ecclesiastical Knee Syndrome’.

The Holy Week (Megali Evdomada) is this week, and it’s the most significant date in the Greek calendar. From all my many years of visiting Greece, Easter leaves indelible memories for its sense of drama and anticipation. Much of the drama is supplied by the  daily church services that are like small one-act plays of varying intensity and nail-biting climaxes that progress the story of Easter, which seems unique to the Orthodox Church. Even if you’re not religious, it’s a wonderful chance to see Greeks at their most reverent, and at their colourful best, with plenty of pomp, circumstance and sometimes unplanned slip-ups showing that the best rehearsed productions can be derailed.

When we were living in the hillside village of Megali Mantineia in the Mani (southern Peloponnese), the sombre Easter Friday service ran slightly amok when Wallace, our naughty Jack Russell terrier, disgraced himself, slipped out of our village house and raced along with the procession, turning a timeless ritual into a cross between a riot and a Crufts obstacle course for Jack Russells. The Friday service is the grand procession of the Epitafios, where a flower-decked bier, representing the crucified Christ, is carried through villages and cities everywhere in Greece, and is a magical event to witness.

Our village procession started at the main church, went up to the graveyard, so the papas could offer prayers for the dead, and looped back along village lanes towards the church again, with the papas and elders at its head. Wallace managed to invade it early on. I don’t think the villagers had seen anything quite like the hyperkinetic Wallace, weaving his way through the procession, a blur of white fur, and retrieving him required a bit of a miracle. It became one of the chapters in my first memoir Things Can Only Get Feta.

Marjory with naughty Wallace, the Easter procession buster

The services in this Easter week are awe-inspiring for their organisation, their props and those amazing psaltes, chanters, who advance most of the service and seem tireless. Even during the tough economic crisis, no detail was ever spared and for that you can only admire the Greeks. Yet sometimes nerves get the better of everyone. On one of the Thursday services in our first year in the Mani, which is a particularly long and devotional service, the poor deacon, standing beside the local papas, turning over the pages of the old hymn book, overlooked the massively smoking censer in his hand.

“The incense started off with fragrant puffs but quickly increased to billowing acrid clouds that shrouded the first few rows of seating. We started coughing and choking. If this had been an aeroplane, oxygen masks would have dropped from the ceiling by now.” (Things Can Only Get Feta, chapter 25).

Easter Sunday with the family who featured in Marjory’s second travel memoir, Homer’s Where The Heart Is

I have experienced Easter in many locations in Greece, from tiny islands to cities. In each location, the church services have been handled with aplomb. I have also found the same level of hospitality and kindness from locals, with many invitations to share the traditional Sunday roast with an extended Greek family. One of my first Greek Easters was in Crete, which I first visited in the 1970s on my first long odyssey to Greece. I had been living and working in Athens, but before I left I had taken a few weeks’ break in Crete with a friend. We were offered a tiny holiday house by an Athenian colleague. It was opposite the beach in a completely authentic, untouched area of the northern coast, east of Hania. While the area is, sadly, unrecognisable now from what I remember then, it was a glorious piece of old Greece, with a few nearby houses, a taverna across the road, a deserted beach and not much else.

My friend and I had planned to have a quiet Easter as we knew no-one there and we knew very little about Easter customs and protocol. On Sunday morning, however, there was a knock at the door. It was the farmer who lived up the hill behind us. He vibrantly announced Christos Anesti which I knew meant, Christ Is Risen, the salutation after the Saturday night service. He told us that for the traditional Sunday feast he was roasting one of his lambs and that we must come and join his family. There was no way we could refuse. He insisted.

So we went up to his house, where the lamb was turning slowly on a spit outside and the olive groves around us were filled with succulent meaty, herby aromas. A big family had gathered: grandparents, kids, everyone excited to be eating a proper meal after weeks of the strict Lenten fast. We had lunch at a long table surrounded by these wonderful, big-hearted people, whom I could barely talk to as I spoke only limited Greek then. Somehow we managed okay and enjoyed all the conviviality, the laughter and lusty cracking of the dyed eggs, an ancient Orthodox ritual that symbolises eternal life and becomes a contest to see who can crack everyone else’s eggs without cracking their own.

Boiled eggs are dyed red for Easter and decorated with other symbols of the season

Jim and Marjory enjoying the egg-cracking contest at a memorable supper with their Kalamatan friend Kostas and his lovely family 

This Sunday lunch experience was during my first long but youthful foray into a foreign culture and I had never come across such inclusiveness and kindness before from strangers, even having grown up in friendly, knock-about Australia. This was unique and the memory has lingered.

Every Easter I have spent in Greece has taught me something more about the Greek spirit, the sense of filoxenia, hospitality and this unique culture. It has also offered me some unexpected, occasionally humorous, outcomes, and the odd devious medical problem which Jim and I came across during Easter, 2014, for our second odyssey in southern Greece, in Koroni. We had decided that we would set ourselves the task for Lent of going to every evening church service of Megali Evdomada, in a different church each night, which we had never done before.

Some of the chanters at an Easter service in Koroni, Messinia

We made it through the first part of the week no trouble, but by Thursday, which is a very long service, nearly three hours, depicting Christ’s crucifixion, we were starting to run out of steam. Jim developed a painful problem which he called Ecclesiastical Knee Syndrome (EKS) because there is so much standing up and sitting down during Greek services, and at this time of year, churches are slightly cold and bone-numbing.

“The service was longer than I ever remembered any to be, full of Greek I couldn’t decipher, and as I glanced around the church I saw many Greeks looking pale and wilted, with many of the men discreetly slipping outside for a quick cigarette in the cool evening air. As foreigners, we felt the need to stay, and endure, lest we be considered slightly soft or disinterested. Nine-thirty came and went in a strange agony of chanting, incense and a babble of high Greek. Unlike Jim, after a while I welcomed EKS, and every opportunity to stand up and feel my legs like an economy passenger on a long-haul flight to Australia which is what the service began to feel like.” (Chapter 2, A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree).

A Byzantine church in the Mani hills

But the Thursday service actually ended with a surprise, slightly controversial, climax that was worth the wait, despite distressed knee cartilage. And it was a dramatic lead-up to the finale of this week, which is the Saturday service. This is something that everyone should experience once in their lives, which in the Orthodox Church represents the resurrection of Christ. And on a less illustrious level, it also represents the end of the Lenten agony for many devout Greeks, who have lived for six weeks on boiled greens and water, or near enough. It represents the end of an ecclesiastical  marathon. I have experienced this Saturday service in Greek cathedrals and also in tiny island churches and it never fails to be affecting and inspiring.

 

The moment when the church is plunged into darkness at midnight and a single lighted candle is brought out of the sanctuary by the papas and its light slowly shared to every other member of the congregation until the church is luminescent is a simple, yet thrilling spectacle. And if you are lucky enough to also hear a particularly good rendition of the hymn Christos Anesti (Christ is Risen) then you are truly blessed.

Happy Easter!

Καλη Aνάσταση! (Kali Anastasi) Have a good resurrection, as they say in Greece!

(To hear the Vangelis rendition of Christos Anesti performed by Greek actress, Irene Pappas, please click on the link below.)

https://youtu.be/AKwizUzyj0I

For more information about Marjory’s three travel memoirs about living in Greece during the crisis, go to the books page on the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com or the books page on Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

The third book, A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree is available on all Amazon sites:

amazon.uk

amazon.com

To buy either of the first two books please click on the Amazon links below:

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

Messages are always welcome. Thanks for calling by. x

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Why we must keep the spirit of old Greece afloat . . .

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Marjory being rowed about Elounda harbour by a kindly local during a long sabbatical in Crete, 1989

AS someone who has been going to Greece all my life, since the 1970s, the political events of the past few months have saddened me. I am wondering, along with everyone else, how Greece’s economic situation and its politics ever got so convoluted.

In recent months the scenario has included punishing negotiations for a new bailout; a referendum called by PM Alexis Tsipras, who then ignored the results, as well as the 65 per cent of Greeks opposing austerity; a new and terrifying agreement signed with the Troika; a mutiny by some Syriza MPs; Tsipras’s resignation; a September election tipped; a new breakaway leftist party. There have been frenetic political twists and turns, like a manic rollercoaster with brake failure. Most Greeks claim to be confused now.

As one of my Twitter followers, a Greek teacher, recently said: “I don’t know which way is up or down any more? Worse, I don’t know which way is right or left.”

Many others are devastated. A female friend in Athens, with a young son, wrote to me recently, saying: “We feel that we are on a boat that’s sinking. We don’t know what comes next and we are trying to live from day to day.”

She also believes, as someone who works as an economist in the city, that the country will change drastically in the coming years after the next bout of austerity and the fire sale of assets.

I too have had a feeling of dread for months that we are witnessing the last carefree days of the Greece that we all used to know and love. I hope my Athens friend is wrong, but in my heart I fear she is right. Change is coming!

No head for heights: The statue at the Ancient Agora in Athens

A headless statue in the Agora, Athens seems to say more about the troubled present day city that it does about the past

I have been in love with Greece all my life, from the early 1970s on my first trip, not long after high school in Australia, when I arrived in Athens for a short break and ended up staying for a year’s working holiday. Despite the fact Greece was then ruled by a military dictatorship, and it was yet another tragic time in its history, in other ways it was, culturally and socially at least, a time of simplicity, even innocence, compared to now.

All the elements of Greek life and culture that philhellenes still love were there in abundance. I wrote about this time in Athens as a parallel narrative in my book Homer’s Where The Heart Is. When I first arrived in the city and stepped off the overland bus from London it was love at first sight: “It was nothing I could easily define, but more a fusion of disparate things, all maddeningly exotic to my young mind: the incomprehensible street signs, the old people dressed in black, the coffee shops, the bakeries wafting aromas of freshly baked bread and tiropites, and all the other smells even the bad ones – fetid drains and a city still staggering after a long summer heatwave. It all blended into a heady Levantine cocktail.”

I have had many trips to Greece since, some for just a few weeks’ vacation, but many were quite long, from a few months to my recent four-year odyssey in southern Greece.

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Jim and Marjory with their friend Artemios on a trip to Santorini in 2002

When I remember the earlier trips, I feel so much nostalgia for that old Greece, whether it was in Athens or places of unique beauty like Santorini, or small unspoilt islands like Serifos, Sifnos, Paxos, Patmos and for a way of life that was simple and charming, where donkeys were more common than cars and you could only buy your yoghurt in ceramic bowls, where there was only one kind of coffee, Nescafe, and where the drachma still reigned. Joining the Eurozone was a futuristic folly. Despite not having much money, most people seemed happier, and were fantastically hospitable.

In 1989, I took a sabbatical from my newspaper job in Sydney and went to Crete for two months. It was totally unplanned, no itinerary, no rooms booked in advance. I took a boat from Piraeus to Irakleion and travelled to the Venetian town of Hania. I hadn’t planned getting sick either, but a stomach bug left me stranded in a harbourside hotel for days, where a doctor had to be summoned.

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The harbour at Elounda in Crete, some years after Marjory’s first trip. Picture courtesy of www.dilos.com

Later on, a chance recommendation from a fellow Aussie made me seek out a convalescence of sorts in Elounda, a small undeveloped fishing village then on the north-eastern coast of the island. Too weak to bother with buses, I got in a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Elounda. It didn’t seem strange to the driver that when we got there, I hadn’t anything booked. Don’t worry, he said kindly, we’ll find you something. It was October after all and not bursting with tourists, not back then anyway.

Near the harbour he stopped the car, but before he started scouting for rooms, a small rotund woman rushed out of her house, towards the taxi. Did I want a room, she asked me.

The taxi driver waited patiently while I followed her inside to see the small apartment (a bedroom, bathroom and tiny kitchen) on the ground floor. It was simple and clean. I took it on the spot, the taxi driver was dispatched, happy with his healthy fare and tip. That was the start of a wonderful stay in Elounda, and a friendship with the couple upstairs, Poppy and George, with whom I practically lived for the rest of my stay, watching their TV,  sharing meals, helping Poppy to prepare some of them. I would often sit on her upstairs balcony with a few neighbouring women, chattering and cleaning mountains of horta (greens) just collected from the hills.

The couple also took me out on their small boat, the Peristeri, for local excursions. Once they took me fishing at 5am to the nearby island of Spinalonga, before Victoria Hislop had been inspired to set her book The Island there, about the former leper colony. When I went it was just a rather ruined and forlorn outpost.

The rest of the time in Elounda, I rambled the hills behind the village, often with Poppy, often alone, and everywhere I went people invited me in for drinks, coffee, meals, parea, company. When I finally left, Poppy and George hugged me and told me I must stay in touch as if I were a long-lost relative.

Greeks were like that then. And they still are in many parts of the country, especially in the islands and rural places like the southern Peloponnese, where we spent four years from 2010, living the first year in a remote hillside village in the Mani and later in Koroni, at the tip of the Messinian peninsula. In these areas we were shown the same warmth and familiarity by locals, as Poppy and George.

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Some of the regulars in one of Koroni’s surviving old kafeneia in the main square

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An old traditional shop in Koroni, a pantopoleio, on Karapavlou St, selling everything from wine to organic food and owned by the charming Tasos Sipsas

But Greece as a country has been slowly changing, of course. How could it not? It’s not a folk museum, after all. It has become more modern, European, apart from the plumbing, which remains antique! And inevitably, many of the old cultural elements are changing or disappearing. Fewer rural Greeks wear traditional clothing now. There are fewer kafeneia and ouzeries in villages than there used to be; there are fewer working villages. In the Mani we found that many wonderful hillside villages that were once full of life, shops and schools, were now inhabited by only a dozen or so locals. In many it was hard to find even one kafeneio or local store.

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A folky and humorous sign for the local barbers, the Golden Scissors, in Koroni

With the drastic economic changes and cuts that are coming, will too much of Greece’s traditional life and customs change irrevocably, to squeeze Greece into a rule-bound northern Europe template? Trouncing all the features that, ironically, tourists go to Greece to experience?

I think that’s something that everyone with any ounce of love for Greece should fight against. We must save the spirit of old Greece, its personality, its old customs and crafts, and its ideals of friendship and hospitality because, as so many other countries have found, once you dismantle a country’s soul and the uniqueness of its past, you can never really get it back again. No-one who has travelled to Greece from the 1960s onwards could come to terms with that loss. Not least the inimitable Greeks themselves.

HOMER'S COVER FOR WEB

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

TO read more about living in Greece during the crisis in the southern Peloponnese, read my new travel memoir Homer’s Where The Heart Is. This is the sequel to the first, Things Can Only Get Feta (first published in 2013) about the start of our long odyssey in the rural Mani.

To those who have already read the latest book, thanks for your kind comments and Amazon reviews, which are always appreciated.

Both books are available on all Amazon’s international sites and also on the Book Depository www.bookdepository.com (with free overseas postage). If you are in Greece you can inquire about having the book ordered at your branch of the Public store www.public.gr

If any readers have queries about availability for both books, please contact me via the contact page on our website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com where you will also find a ‘books’ page with other information about the books.

To buy either of my books please click on the Amazon links below:

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey

And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs

Thanks for calling by.

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