Easter Weekend on Samos Greece - Good Friday



Good Friday in Vourliotes, 2016
photo by Newell

Easter weekend is a very big holiday in Greece.  Many businesses close from Saturday through Wednesday for the celebration.  Because of differences in the Julian and the Gregorian Calendars, Orthodox Easter fell on May first this year.  We had booked our plane tickets months ago, so the holiday was an unexpected bonus to our trip.

We touched down on Samos in the afternoon of Good Friday.  It was in the morning of Good Friday that Christ and the two thieves were crucified.  In deference to the Jewish holiday, the Romans hastened those executions so the bodies could be removed from the crosses and buried by sundown on the eve of the Sabbath (Saturday) and the first day of Passover.



Vourliotes' Own Papa Kostas
photo by Newell

At sunset, the church bells in our village began the call to worship, and a short time later we could hear the priest singing the Orthodox service from our house.  This was the first of several progressive services and a pageant to commemorate the death of Christ.  The whole village turned out for the event.  Each church or monastery has a special canopy or epitaphio that is intricately decorated with fresh flowers.  The flowered canopy represents the body and spirit of Christ.  After the first service it was carried in progress through the village and out to the cemetery, where the body of Christ is symbolically buried among the departed villagers.  The procession then moved to the Platea (village square) where a another was sung by the priest, who showered the crowd of bystanders with fresh flower petals.  The pageant ended back at church where the celebrants passed under the floral ‘epitaph’ and were sprinkled with cologne water.  There may have been still another service, but I had to leave.


Flower decorated Epitaphio - center
photo by Newell
 

By the end of the night I was exhausted.  We had just finished a 24-hour travel day and I had stood or walked another 3 hours during the procession.  When I finally crawled into bed, my last conscious thoughts were of the generations of our neighbors who had been and might be, reenacting that same pageant for centuries to come.  I also thought about the mortal remains of villagers who lie buried under their marble crypts, facing the East, patiently waiting for the dawn of their own resurrections. There is an aura of peaceful continuity and permanence about this place that I miss when I'm back in the States.





The Vourliotes Cemetery at night
photo by Newell