It is the beginning of Easter Week here in Greece. Today is Palm Sunday (as we call it in the Western Church) and tomorrow all of the women will begin the preparations that will lead up to the great feast on Saturday night and the loud and joyous proclamations of “Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!” or “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”
Easter is a very special time in Greece, the most special holiday in fact. All the pomp and circumstance that the Western World (the United States especially) usually throws into Christmas is bestowed here upon Easter. Homes are cleansed and purified, flowers set in the windows and carefully tended on balconies. The men are sent to pick up the goat or lamb or kid that has been specially ordered from the butcher a few weeks before. Wives and grandmas pull down the yeast again and the special spices to knead and bake the sweetbread – tsoureki – that signals the end of the fasting. And kids and grandkids gleefully dye their eggs a deep, passionate red and anticipate the “cracking” contests that will ensue over Sunday’s feast.
Already in Athens the exodus has begun, a slight trickle on Monday that will become a veritable flood by Friday, as man, woman, son and daughter, all become part of the river of pilgrimage that will lead back to their true source: the village.
The village is one of the three pillars of Greek society that carries a significance far more weighty than what we Westerners generally call “my hometown.” Along with the family and the church, the village is the place where each person learns his or her place in the world, his or her orientation. Who am I? Where am I going? What am I doing here? These are all questions the village (along with the church and the family) attempts to answer.
When you meet a Greek person for the first time, these are also the kind of questions you will be asked: Who are you? Where are you going? What are you doing here? But the greatest, and probably the first question you will be asked is this: Where are you from?
On the one hand, this is a very reasonable question for a Greek person to be asking – you are probably a foreigner, you may or may not be speaking Greek (and, if you are, probably with a very strong accent), and you probably look different too. It’s only natural for this to be the first question.
But this question – Where are you from? – is also the first question a Greek will ask another Greek, as well. Where are you from? From what village? Who is your family? All of this is an attempt to get a read on this person: Who is she? Where is she going? What is she doing here? By knowing someone’s village, it’s sometimes possible to know the answers to all of these questions – and many others – as well. This is also how connections are formed and made.
As you can imagine, one’s affiliation to one’s village is incredibly strong in Greece, almost as strong as that of the family. It’s where identities are created and nurtured and, it seems to my untrained eye, where knowledge of one’s place in life is (almost) always guaranteed. As you can imagine, too, this can also exaggerate one’s sense of foreignness if she, like me, does not actually have a village or, in fact, is not Greek at all.
Easter is the one time of year in Greece where I truly feel myself to be “ekseni”: an outsider, foreign, a stranger. And as the Holy Week preparations begin, I am the observer, peering through a pane of glass that separates me from a living diorama of ambitious activity.
Where am I from? This question repeats itself in my mind and in my heart. Where am I going?
As I start this Easter week, these questions will be ever present in my mind as I attempt to both create and preserve traditions of my own. And my sneaking suspicion is that the answer lies between.
What about you?
Where are you from?
Where are you going?
What traditions make you feel most connected to your family or sense of place in the world?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Have a beautiful Sunday,
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