Non-believers celebrate religious feast days, too, like Greek Orthodox Easter
I say I don’t believe in God, but as I get older I greatly enjoy Easter (Passover or Pecha), the Eastern Orthodox Easter. Jesus was resurrected twice in our home; last week as a Catholic, this Saturday at midnight as an Orthodox.
“You’re not the only ones celebrating Easter,” my wife said on Friday, probing our Greek superiority complex. But we know that we are actually the first. (Saul or Paul had to write to the Corinthians, Thessalonians, and Ephesians; if the Greeks had not adopted the new faith, a kind of mild Judaism for the Gentiles, the Romans never would have.)
In Spain, they eat potaje – chickpea and bacalao (cod) soup – followed by torrijas – Spanish-style French toast. My late communist father had no time for church: “Tools of the state. They are always on the side of the government,” he said. But Pascha was important even to him. The name Anastasios means resurrection and Easter Sunday is his name day.
My father used to say, “Jesus was a radical rabbinic socialist and fought against Rome…don’t listen to your grandmother, the Romans killed her, not the Jews.” My mother embraced the “love is everything” view of the late 1960s. “Jesus was like John Lennon.” As a child, I associated Lennon and Lenin with Jesus.
As children, my parents experienced the Nazi carnival of horror in Greece, followed by the bloody fratricide of the Greek Civil War as a teenager. “Where was God when the Nazis burned churches full of civilians or the royalists hanged partisans…it was Jesus who died,” my father would say, loud enough for my grandmother to hear. He named him “Atheos”. My grandmother tried to protect my sister and me from her “bad ideas.”
Later, as a young adult, I would remind my father how Archbishop Damaskinos saved thousands of Greek Jews by converting them to Christianity. SS Oberführer Jürgen Stroop threatened him with a firing squad. Damaskinos replied, “It is a tradition in the Greek church to hang clergy.” The Nazis left in anger. “Oh, a good priest…” my father would say.
As a child, 40 days of fasting (no meat, no milk, no butter, some fish, and no animal products come Holy Week) killed me. “What… no Coco Pops!” I would go crazy. My mom secretly gave me milk and Coco Pops in the morning. Without him, I might have been wasted as a chubby kid in Adelaide in the early 1970s. I’m trying to fast for Greek Holy Week.
On “Megali Pempti” or Maundy Thursday, I dye the eggs red. On Saturday, my son and I are attending Anastasi’s resurrection ceremony. We arrive at 11.45pm, armed with candles (foil wrapped lamphes) to receive the “holy light”. We join in a Byzantine hymn, Hristos Anesti (“Christ is risen”). My son Anastasios, when I think of my father’s resurrection, had never met him; My father died at the age of 62.
Residents complain about noise, traffic and all the “weird nonsense” as someone once shouted. I do all this so my son knows that our faith is about identity. We Greek Orthodox are committed to something ancient, intangible, and unique.
After church, we go to someone’s home, family and friends to break the fast. We eat avgolemono soup (egg and lemon soup), compete in breaking red-dyed eggs, and enjoy wine, halvah, koulouria, and tsoureki, sweet bread with mahlab like Jewish challah.
On Easter Sunday, smoke from charcoal spits rises from backyards across Melbourne as Greeks feast on Pascha. Fortunately, the slaughter of lambs, also a Passover tradition, is done in remote slaughterhouses. I was 13 when my Uncle Harry brought home a lamb for Easter. My cousins and I called him Lamby. One day during Holy Week, Lamby disappeared. My uncle said he had to “go back to the farm.” Then we noticed that Lamby was turning coal on a spit for Easter.
Why would an atheist do this? Ethnicity? History? Tradition? Family? Partially. But mostly to tear apart the fabric of contemporary life. Orthodox Easter is an out-of-this-world experience, whether Greek, Lebanese, Ethiopian or Serbian. Cantors sing Byzantine melismatic hymns combined with Eastern incense. We are all in a church that has not changed for 2000 years. Whether in Jerusalem, Athens, Addis Ababa, Istanbul or Melbourne, our church remains a timeless boundary space that connects us all.
Fotis Kapetopoulos is a journalist for the English edition of the magazine. Neos Kosmosa leading Greek-Australian imprint.
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Fotis Kapetopoulos is a journalist for the English edition of Neos Kosmos, a leading Greek-Australian imprint.
