A Traditional Greek Village Wedding

by Alec Newell 

 

The receiving line - photos by Newell

 

A typical wedding picture from a home in the village

I don't think I've been in a single home in the village that didn't have at least one traditional wedding picture hanging from its plastered walls.  Greek weddings like the Irish wakes have evolved into national stereotypes, so when we got the word that there would be a wedding in the village, I didn't want to miss it. 

 

Father of the bride

Our house stands about half way between the Orthodox Church where the wedding would be and the village plateia or town square where the banquet and reception was to be held afterward, so even without an invitation, I'd be able to see everything but ceremony itself.  The people in the wedding party:  the couple, the parents, the in-laws, bride's maids, flower girls, and even the Orthodox priest, all looked like they could have just stepped out of central casting for a Hollywood movie.  I'd heard from neighbors that the bride was Greek and that the Groom's accent sounded "British," but that wasn't enough information for a story. I needed to know more.  Their story turned out to be better than fiction.

Flower girls

I discovered that the groom was Welsh and the bride was indeed Greek with maternal family ties to the village going back at least four generations.  The bride's ancestral home, built by her great grandfather, is only six meters or less than twenty feet from the church where her grandmother and aunt had been married.  The bride, from about the age of thirteen, had always expressed an interest in being married in that same church one day.

I arranged a visit with the bride's mother, an aunt and the grandmother, to find out more about the people in the wedding and the family.  Over traditional Greek coffee and cookies from the bakery, I was treated to the whole family history.  It was an interesting and complex tale that closely parallels the national saga in which successive generations of young Greeks have left the country to seek opportunities an foreign countries, only to be drawn back at critical junctures of their lives to reconnect with family members and the villages which have been the cultural taproot that still anchors them to their Greek heritage.

The ancestral home and family portrait

The bride's great grandfather had been a Greek national who had gone to America early in the 20th Century, and had found work there as a lumber jack.  After losing a leg in a logging accident, he returned to Greece, married a girl who had been born here in Vourliotes, and had added a second story to the house where we were having coffee.

The bride's grandmother had met her husband near the village well in the days before the house had been piped for running water.  He was a young soldier from Athens, doing his military service on Samos.  To keep their meetings discreet, she would hang a white towel in an upstairs window of that house to signal the young soldier that she was on her way to the well.  In time the young soldier and his bride left the village for Cardiff, Wales where he found work as a ship's chandler servicing Greek merchant vessels engaged in the Welsh coaling trade.

The village's most recent bride was that ship chandler's granddaughter.  She was born and grew up in the UK, but made frequent summer visits back to their grandmother's house in Vourliotes.  That house is still in the family.  As a youngster, the girl would return home from her summer vacations speaking Greek and dreaming of her own wedding in the old church.  This week's wedding was the culmination of a single dream shared by three generations of women from the same family who had all worked hard to make that vision come true.  
 

The bride and groom

Reception banquet

 



The wedding with its large communal outdoor reception: the large seated banquet, the live music, drinking and dancing were traditions that seemed to breathe a renewed excitement into an aging village.  It was everything I had imagined that a traditional Greek wedding could be, and more.

The bride's maternal grandparents

Talking with the bride's grandmother, I learned an interesting sidebar to this story.  When I asked to see the picture from her own wedding, she told me that the photographer who had taken the picture had also made a blow-up of it as a window display for his studio. The enlarged photo was such a novelty at the time, that it actually drew small crowds on the sidewalk.  When the young couple saw it, they offered to buy the enlargement for themselves, but couldn't afford the price the photographer was asking for it.  The picture shown above went with them to Cardiff, the blow-up stayed behind on Samos, and has been lost to time.

For background information on this post read: "The Greek Diaspora" - 7/1/2013
at:  http://mysamoshome.blogspot.gr/2013/07/the-greek-diaspora.html