Multiple Resurrections

I came to the island of Lefkada to spend Easter weekend. The traditional church ceremony was the funniest I have been to in many years. Fireworks lit the sky at 11:15pm, 45 minutes earlier!! A granny asked me if Christ's Resurrection had happened. I told her with a very serious face that in this church they resurrect Christ one hour earlier because the priest has to go to another church soon after.

She seemed disappointed and asked why, so I decided to laugh at this and made up a story about many priests in the island losing their jobs this year because of the bad economy so the ones with a job had to take their shifts or God would not forgive their slacking! The granny kept nodding her head. I don't know if she believed me but she kept nodding. I then looked around and watched others puzzled and confused rolling their eyes in front of their watches. The 45-minutes-premature fireworks were still lighting up the sky, I just had to burst out laughing nervously. I couldn't help it.

I decided to go inside the church as the spectacle outside was unbelievably surrealist and I couldn't control my laughs. Soon as I came in, some of the guys that were standing in the church yard outside, started taking turns exploding detonators. They were obsessive. No one would take a break and the blasts kept coming. Being inside the church it sounded as if a Panathinaikos-Olympiakos soccer game was going on outside. Or Gulf War 3. When some detonators would explode too close to the church's windows and blast out loud, all the little kids inside the church would scream and interrupt the priest. And oh man, the priest!

He was definitely a character on his own. He was chanting fast and in a low voice, he seemed in a hurry to go hide in a bunker or stop the ceremony and go out to scold the fire workers to stop it. Yeah right!

He kept interrupting the liturgy once every 2-3 minutes not to ask someone to go tell the kids to stop exploding the detonators but to ask the crowd to come closer and fill the space in front of him. Was he worried about some part of the church falling or something? Thank Christ I didn't have to wait long to figure out why he was in such a hurry.

The priest turned the lights off inside the church around 11:40pm, twenty minutes earlier than usual, then he appeared on stage like a rock star holding the holy flames and chanting out so loud now it was impossible to hear the explosions outside. He was a rustic paparokas live on stage, a rock-star priest. That's why he would gesture to people with his hands to make them come closer to him. He so desperately wanted to have the crowd fill in the space in front of him he wouldn't mind interrupting the liturgy to nudge people to come closer. What a funny guy!

He was like a stage director planning on making an impressive stage appearance for himself after the lights switched off! Could it be that he was secretly filming the ceremony too? He didn't seem to mind the detonators or the early launch of the fireworks at all!

At some point, however, he must have realized he hurried the whole thing too much. A premature resurrected Christ might have whispered it to him. 20 minutes to midnight. Everyone's looking at their watches again. The paparokas priest has to do something to patch it, so he did the most natural thing to him. He kept chanting the Christ Resurrected theme so many times over and over and over, I think this was the first Easter in my life I must have witnessed multiple resurrections of Christ.

What a weird little village church. Totally asynchronous and absolutely hilarious. After this, I don't want to spend Easter in Athens anymore. Local villages are so much more fun. So unpredictable and idiosyncratic!

http://www.thinkaloo.com