Living Happiness

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?

Have a beautiful Sunday,

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Photo Credits:

Yesterday morning found me sitting on my back veranda in a pool of warm sunlight. I was eating creamy Greek yogurt – rich and decadent – with a topping of fresh, sweet strawberries, and looking out over Souda Bay at the White Mountains in the distance.

The morning was deceptively still. I say deceptively for in all of the nooks and crannies of our garden, all kinds of activity was being engaged in by bees and butterflies, birds and snails. There was a great deal of flitting about, a great deal of alighting on flowers and taking off again, and, by the snails, a great deal of slowly but surely creeping along (who also seem to think that our bathroom is the Copa Cabana of Chania but that is another story for another day).

Spring is coming to Greece. At least, this is the belief shared by almost all of my Greek friends. “There will be no more winter,” they boldly proclaim like the most famous of their ancient seers, “Spring is on it way.” And in preparation for its grand arrival, they then proceed to open up windows and shutters, throw wide the doors, and begin the process of Greek spring cleaning: banging out carpets, sweeping balconies, changing light fixtures, hosing down driveways. Spring is here!

I love the Greek word for spring. It seems to capture the season so much more than the word I am used to. It is Anoiksi, which literally means “Opening.” Don’t you just love this? How can you not?

Buds open, flowers open, doors and windows get flung wide open, and so, too, I often find does my heart. Cramped and crowded from a winter indoors, my heart is the first part of me that goes running full tilt outside when the first rays of warm sunlight tiptoe onto the doorstep. It throws off its heavy winter coat, slips into an airy sundress, and twirls in increasingly drunken rings until it crashes, dizzy and delirious, in the buttercups at its feet. Only when the weather gets a bit warmer does my body finally follow suit. My heart has been out there long before, lazily waiting in the grass under the lemon tree, finding cloud shapes in the sky overhead. “What took you so long,” it always asks me when I finally do arrive, “and where’s the lemonade?”

Would love to hear from you today, as always.

Namaste,

opening flickrphoto by Madison Guy

additional flickrphoto by Little Laddie