Saturday

 Saturday..... almost done

The ceremony of the Holy Fire took place again without incident. The Light is on its way from Jerusalem in the Presidential plane. All is well with the Greek Orthodox world. Every home will have a candle lit from the sacred flame which appears 'miraculously' every Easter in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Holy Land. 

K cut up all the innards of the Easter lamb, heart, kidney, lungs, liver, spleen, intestines and I have started the mageritsa. This is the soup made from innards, lettuce, dill and rice, thickened with egg and lemon juice. 

There's just the midnight service to attend, or maybe just watch on TV. There are live broadcasts from the Cathedral in Athens and from the Patriarchal Cathedral in Konstantinople (Istanbul to you). 

Once 'Christ is Risen' there will be fireworks, much kissing of cheeks and a rush home to end the Lenten fast with family and friends, eating the Easter soup, cracking red eggs and quaffing a few glasses of wine

First though we have to refresh the cross in the doorway protecting our household from the evil eye

Our distant neighbours across the ravine have gathered from Athens for the Easter holiday.  They've been celebrating, loudly, from early afternoon . 

7pm and it's gone quiet. They must be sleeping it off. I hope they don't go down for the midnight mass and return at 2am refreshed and ready to continue an all night revel

So everyone

Happy Orthodox Easter

Happy Easter celebrations to our Serbian Orthodox family in NZ

And keep safe kiwis!!  Our NZ family are in the eye of Cyclone Vaianu

Good Friday

 No work today especially not before the church bells ring at around 10am.  It's a very Holy day. K eats boiled potatoes, bread and olives. Not even any oil

The bells ring the death knell all day. Christ is taken down off the cross and put on his flower bedecked bier ready for the candlelight parade tonight. 

The tradition is.....

To make the rounds of the 4 big churches to see each flower decorated Epitafio (funeral platform).  When my girls were wee children my greek sister-in-law encouraged them to crawl underneath to ensure good health.

Today my 'wee' granddaughters did just that, 3 times, making the outline of a cross.

And having a giggle methinks

Meanwhile I went out for coffee and hot(cross-less) buns with 2 dear friends

Jan and Birgit

We go back many many years, all of us are local-aliens

As the English tradition is to eat hotcross buns on Good Friday, that is what we did.  I made an overnight dough and baked them this morning.  

The last batch turned out like hard little rocks so I made sure these were more than a mouthful and quite soft and fluffy too. Perfect with a morning cappuccino or frappé. 

K was busy delivering little gifts of red eggs and koulourakia to friends, neighbours and family. As is the custom (not to mention the tradition) 

The day ended with the candlelight light parade

Elli and Luli

And all the family

Followed the Epitafio with our plain brown beeswax candles

Danae

The after show

Another family tradition

Lenten meze (selection of tasty little greek nibbles) and a few glasses of wine or beer

Thursday Work Day

 Holy Thursday.... work day

Traditionally the day to dye all those eggs.  Traditionally the colour is red

Chief Easter Bunny 

Traditional day for traditional koulourakia too

The little easter bunnies getting into action, Nels and Poppi

Factory line

Because they've got butter and eggs they not supposed to be eaten till after midnight on Saturday

I can assure you they're delicious, buttery, crisp on the outside, orangey and aromatic

The Easter bunnies had a Nana-list

Moving round the heavy pots in the garden and doing some pruning

Changing the duvet cover

Searching out stuff at the back of the cupboard

Scrubbing a few winter rugs

Poppi doing what she's told to by her big sister

Poppi says she is NOT doing what her sister is telling her to do. Pritz! NEVER

They cleaned up everything before they left, did all the dishes, hung the rugs over the gate to drip dry. I was exhausted just watching them 

Grandkids grow up and move on. It's absolutely wonderful when they return

Easter Week

 Palm Sunday............

 A traditional fish eating day.  The rest of the week is strict fasting for many.

Holy Monday....

Nice sunny day so I did some washing

Holy Tuesday......

Holy Moly, a miracle.  Cousin Julia's Xmas card arrived, from England, in time for Easter.  Thats got to be a record for the P. O. 

First waterfront coffee of 2026

Locals sitting in the shade in jackets, tourists in the sun in short sleeves

Shopping

2 trays of eggs. That's 60 of them to hard boil and dye red

Spring flowers and a pungent basil plant. Now I have to put them in the ground.

  I already planted my little marigold, the sage cutting and sweet potato 

Saw our first tortoise shuffling up the road. No snakes yet

Wednesday........

Boiling those 60 eggs without breaking any.  Yeh, that never happens.  We are told to add vinegar to the water, salt, or put a cloth at the bottom of the pot so they don't rattle around.  All useless tips.  Some are always going to break or have cracks in the shell.  I'm not in charge of this operation but I get to eat all the broken eggs.

Only 4 or 5 broken, so far.  The cracked ones are going to get dyed with the rest tomorrow.  The dye isn't toxic, they say

Lenten Cake and Lazarakia

 This Saturday is called the Saturday of Lazaros.  In years gone by I've made Lazarakia, little sweet-bread-men in their funeral wraps. They represent Lazaros rising from the dead.  A bit creepy really but very tasty hot from the oven.  Very traditional but I didn't bake any this year

This cake recipe is easier........... 

A cake with no eggs, butter or milk

K loved this one so it's safe to make another one and send out the recipe.  It's vegan, very easy and lots of flavour

In a bowl whisk

1 cup of olive or seed oil

2 cups of sugar

3 cups of some sort of fruit juice. I added a shot glass of orange liqueur too  

Mix in 4 cups of self-raising flour

It's a very sloppy mixture

Pour into a cake baking dish. I used one of those with a hole/funnel in the middle

Bake around 44 minutes at 180o

It sounds very different from the usual cake with butter and milk and eggs. And the mixture is so wet.  Amazingly it turns out perfectly .  Some cakes like this are crumbly. This one is moist and rises well.

I've made three of them this Lent

NB

A memory. I posted about Lazarakia a few years ago when I had actually made a batch. Someone commented how ghoulish they were and they wouldn't eat them.  It hadn't even occurred to me that they might be seen that way.  They're so much a part of greek tradition I just accepted them as part of the pageant.  I look at them in a different light now.  But I'd still bake them, and eat them, if I could be bothered. Hotcross buns are similar but far more acceptable, in my family 

'Deaf' Week

 This is 'Silent' or 'Deaf' week for us.  Time to clean house and home and prepare for Easter. I had a haircut and colour yesterday. That's me done. 

The week ends with Saturday of Lazaros and then Palm Sunday

Then it's Holy Week. There's a special church service everyday winding up with the candlelight parade on Good Friday and the great Easter Sunday celebration

K got into gear and arranged for our annual garden clean up

Sani from Pakistan our happy helper

He had a huge smile on his face when I asked if I could take his photo

Ks 'treasures' are still there round the edges but the jungle of weeds has been conquered. He didn't leave a blade of green

This photo is from the internet but this is what we did before Easter every year when we lived in town.  We whitewashed all our steps and walls. 

The municipality white washes the steps and alley ways now. Or they will if the rain ever ends. 

Sani says he'll come back next week and whitewash our garden walls.  What a great lad

Covered in red silt 

More cleaning

Down on the harbour they're sucking this away quickly

Erminio

 

*Erminio is the name of our latest storm. 

 Yesterday the skies opened and it rained long and hard. We had hours of very heavy rain and rumbling thunder. 

The red Saharan dust cloud  was so thick it felt as though we were captive inside an impenetrable red blanket.  Crete was worst affected and they had to close airports.

Two of our family homes, Jan's and Elli's, were flooded.  Elli had bad leaks in several rooms while Jan had a river running through her dining room and kitchen.  Never happened before. It was the huge endless cascade of water. And yet we had no drips or drops at all in our house. That's a first for us. It just depends where wind is directing the torrent

 Facebook messages from the Mayor  warned us of roads closed because of mud and debris and huge amounts of water elsewhere. Driving anywhere was dangerous . One car was washed into the sea.  Make that 3 cars.  

Water taxis and the car ferry were prohibited from crossing the strait.

Schools are closed today, Thursday, while the buildings are checked for damage and school yards are drained of flood waters. 

We spent the morning checking Facebook photos of the damage and watching tv news. TV crews arrived from Athens and covered the major damage

Fousa. The fertile plain just above our house with its small vineyards 

All the vineyards are completely under water now. Thick red slimy muddy water.  The red Saharan dust is supposed to contain vital minerals but also has toxic elements 

Daughter Danae's 'private' sandy beach has been changed completely and now has a stony sandbar and exposed  pipes

One of the 3 cars swept away onto the newly formed bar of stones and rubble .  Another car is completely under water 

The 3rd car entrapped under the collapsed bridge

The road above has almost completely fallen into the river bed

The old river bed, now calm.  The last time mother nature turned this back into a river was 2014.  Last night it was a powerful mass of raging flood water

The Mayor and his work force are striving to repair the roads and get rid of the debris.  Hotels in this area were preparing for the Protestant (or Catholic) Easter

All my family know this area well. It's the main tourist beach. That's the wall of Helen Apartments on the left and cousin Mike lives just a little further down the river bed.  His house is slightly higher up so no damage.

Across on the mainland, at the Lemon Forest where Jan lives, the road has been closed because of the piles of debris and mud washed down from yet another old river bed.  She has hardly dug herself out of the last storm and is now engulfed by another.  She can't get her bike out and is just a little too far to walk into town for groceries. 

The Municipality will have to do some fast clean up there because the road below her is the main road connecting  Poros and Galatas with all the towns further south, Ermioni, Porto Heli and ferries to the islands of Hydra and Spetses

*Erminio

meaning strength and wholeness 

Italian not greek