29.04.2009
Greek Easter – The biggest festival in the Greek calendar

This year our Easter celebrations in the UK came a week before the Greek Orthodox Easter.  Yianna and I enjoyed a traditional family celebration in the UK, which included our granddaughter’s christening on Easter Sunday, followed by a swift departure to Paxos via Athens armed with what we believed were the basic essentials for a summer sojourn in Greece:

• loads of books I’ve been promising to read for ages – including Bill Bryson and David Peace’s ‘The Damned United’ (haven’t seen the film yet)
• guitar music (my battered old instrument awaited me in the house with many 60s and 70s rock songs to revive plus a smattering of Dylan, Byrds and Beatles that still needed attacking) – God help Yianna – there’s nothing worse than an old rocker who still thinks he’s still got the touch
• photos of our grandchildren
• a recently-acquired digital camera which, once I’ve learned how to use it, might actually enable me to illustrate some of my blogs
• Bisto and brown rice
• a collection of Sudoku puzzles which Yianna has been squirreling away for the last few months.

Getting to Paxos out of season is an experience in itself. Arriving late at night with Easter upon us we had little choice but to take the sea taxi and set off on a beautiful moonlit journey south with Nikos, the owner and skipper.

Easter is the biggest festival of the Greek year and its ancient customs are entirely different from anything we experience in the UK.  The bigger the island the more colourful the revelry. Corfu and Crete have legendarily lively celebrations, but for anyone who loves Greece, Easter is a must, from the carnivals before Lent to flying kites on Clean Monday and finally the strange mixture of solemnity and partying that culminate in Easter weekend.

On Good Friday the symbolic body of Jesus is taken through the streets on a bier. Everyone mourns and the procession is often accompanied by a band setting the pace for a very slow march with the inhabitants of the whole village holding candles as they follow the priest through the streets. Some pass in contemplation, old ladies in black cross themselves and the younger generation surreptitiously wave to friends.

This symbolic Jesus lies in a small coffin kept in every church and every village has its own procession. Yianna and I chose to watch it in Paxos’ main town of Gaios and we got a band. She was adamant that the proceedings were far more meaningful and impressive in Crete. On the other hand I was moved by the whole occasion. Whatever your religious beliefs the unfolding of mysterious rites, fragments of which may be older than Christianity itself, the proud displaying of antique icons, the strewing of the streets and lanes with flowers and the themes of darkness and light and resurrection are all set against a time when the whole countryside is bursting into life. By day the sun is shining and the island is carpeted in wild flowers.

At midnight on the Saturday – the church bells toll to mark the Resurrection and there is an outburst of noise to celebrate. Every village and town competes with each other: guns are fired, myriad fireworks and some startlingly loud firecrackers are set off. We went to Loggos – the smallest of the Paxiot harbours – where a multicoloured constellation of three thousand fireworks lit up the sky and the sea – eliciting gasps and admiration from a crowd of five to six hundred locals.

This spectacle was followed by a traditional soup called ‘Mayiritza’ made from lamb’s liver, lettuce, aniseed, fresh spring onions and rice. This soup symbolises the end of pre-Easter fasting and from then on fasting is the last thing on anyone’s mind. For Easter Sunday itself the central dish is traditional roast lamb cooked on a spit. Just when you think you’ve finished eating another course appears and it’s very difficult to refuse it as Greeks are extraordinarily hospitable. All this is accompanied by large quantities of wine. In our case I had to face this challenge alone as Yianna doesn’t drink since she tried alcohol once about thirty years ago and after a few sips and a few seconds of sheer madness, promptly fell asleep and was carried home.

Unsurprisingly, on the sunny Easter Monday we restricted ourselves to a gentle stroll through the olive groves, and a restrained diet of fruit and water.