My Easter Sundays in Greece and New York

My warmest and most significant adult Easter memories are associated with Greece.

Once upon a time, I lived in Italy. Eager for an Easter vacation, I decided to visit Greece. I really didn't realize what I was getting into. For starters, the entire Greek nation takes the religious aspects of Easter very seriously. That meant heavy travel flows within the country, shops closing on religiously significant days, and an emphasis on family-oriented celebrations. Those realities complicated matters for us. However, they also invaluably opened my eyes to a celebration central to Greek life, regardless of region or municipality. The image from Greek Easter (above) gives a sense of the event's flavor.

On a very chilly Easter Sunday, I met an American-English couple I knew from Rome. They had just arrived in Greece after something of an odyssey from Italy, including experiencing an earthquake in Venice and nearly inadvertently driving into a hostile, very closed Albania. We somehow found some lamb and went to a beach on the Ionian Sea to have a barbecue. As we didn't have any barbecue equipment, we had to improvise. The fire was the easy part. The spit was a challenge, but the Yankee part of the Anglo-American couple solved this by using the metal handle of a pail.

Years later, I lived in a Greek neighborhood in New York. Every Greek Easter, my neighbors formed a proper pit and barbecued a whole lamb over the fire. The marvelous aroma made me very jealous for what they were preparing, but what I could not have. (The Tantalus myth came to mind.) I felt like a stranger in their midst, fascinated by and vaguely understanding what all the fuss was about, but unconnected to their culture's assumptions and needs. I also saw some of the religious observances in one of the local Greek Orthodox churches. I liked those events, as the evident community sense of ritual, celebration, and institutional relevance was unmistakable. This part I understood, except for the Greek Orthodox faith's explicit sense of nationalism.

The Greek religious angle touched me, and still does. I grew up in a small central New York town where religious affiliation mattered. The town was divided along de facto religious lines, and then (and only then) along ethnic lines. Everyone knew the unspoken, but well known deal. I was in the Irish Catholic world, and we had our own church. I was a pretty religious kid, and I loved Easter week. I sang in the choir and truly enjoyed singing the hymns associated with the holiday. The colorful pageantry, the wonderful flowers, the variation between solemnity and celebration, were right up my alley. Many years later, when I saw the Greek services in Athens, I felt touched by the congregation's obvious devotion and belief. It just seemed ironic to witness it in the birthplace of Western philosophy.