Avoiding an Easter Faux Pas

We were lucky to get to experience a Greek Easter firsthand and even luckier to be saved from a major cookie etiquette faux pas! Our friends Haris and Gianni invited us to spend Easter Sunday at Gianni's mom's place outside the city. We've been in Greece for the holiday once before but it was in the extremely tight lockdown of 2020, when you couldn't even walk more than two blocks from your house. After two years of no big family Easter celebrations, Greeks were out in full force. Easter here feels a bit like New Year's Eve, Christmas, and Thanksgiving combined. Shortly before midnight (as Saturday turned into Sunday), we watched hundreds of locals walking to the nearby churches with lit candles. Bells peeled all over the city. And right after midnight we could hear choral singing and priestly recitations from the churches, as fireworks lit up the city. It wasn't an easy night to sleep as another round of fireworks went off an hour later.

Cookie Catastrophe

We'd been asked to bring something sweet to the feast and decided to buy some things at the goat milk product shop we love (which is logically named in Greek-- We Love Goat Milk). The shop doesn't have many sweets, but it does have great goat butter sugar cookies, or kourabiedes as they're called here. Given the limited sweets selection, and knowing they are delicious, we bought a box of kourabiedes. Later that night, wanting to learn more about local traditions, I read about typical Greek Easter dishes. After a long list of dishes that you will see on the Greek Easter table, there was a curious footnote stating what you won't see at the table. Only one foodstuff was listed--kourabiedes! So we checked in with Haris and after much laughter she said basically, yeah, those cookies are solely for Christmas, so it's best to bring something else, "preferably something in syrup" (Greeks love syrup--its practically a food group unto itself!). In our defense, these cookies are delicious and contain butter, sugar, flour, and nuts. Those ingredients are in pretty much every Greek dessert! But we guess it's like bringing a pumpkin pie to July Fourth (I'd still eat that, though). So, with an Easter approved dessert in hand, the slightly syrupy trigona, we headed off with our friends.

Easter Eaters

This winter and first month of spring have been cold and dreary but the weather broke finally. Easter was gorgeous and we spent the day at an outdoor dinner table grazing on all sorts of classic Greek mezedes: tzatziki, roasted red peppers, all sorts of salads, soutsoukakia (little meatballs), chicken pie, and on and on. Just like American families tweak their Thanksgiving menu over the years, our friends have done the same and settled on roasted goat instead of the more typical lamb. And despite Sam's protestations that eating only vegetables was her preference, they roasted a couple pieces of chicken, because, well, it's Greece. There must be meat!

There was a short digestion pause before dessert, but then Haris came out of the kitchen with balloons and a cake and singing the Greek birthday song...a surprise for Sam who will celebrate that day soon! So we had a fancy cake, trigona, and a bevy of other desserts laid in front of us. Then half the party went for naps while the two of us tried to keep up with the mostly Greek language dinner table chat. Oh, and we even did the traditional Greek Easter egg cracking game where you and another person smash your eggs into each other to see which one cracks. Our first, and hopefully not last, egg fight!

Getting Touristy

Festivities have ended and today it seems like a switch got flipped and tourist season has really begun. And despite being in Greece for eight months we'll soon be tourists of a sort when we stop at a few islands before landing in our home for a couple of months, Chania, a couple weeks from now. We leave Thessaloniki on May 3rd...and when we can laugh about it, we'll have to succinctly tell the eventful story of our landlady's "inspection visit" earlier today.