Καλή Ανάσταση

(Happy Easter)

If you are arriving in Cyprus these last days of April 2016, and you are not familiar with Greek (or other) Orthodox Christianity you may be puzzled to find casts of bunny rabbits and Easter eggs at every roundabout or Church Front and the words “ΚΑΛΟ ΠΑΣΧΑ”  (Happy Easter) , “Pascha” being named after the Jewish “Pesach” (Passover).

“But we had Easter on March 27^th,” you may be thinking , wondering if you were in a live playing of “Back to the Future.” Well, for the Orthodox Christians, Easter is on May the 1^st this year. The difference is all down to Pope Gregory XIII who, in 1582, replaced Julius Caesar’s  old Julian Calendar with the new Gregorian calendar. Instead of a year having a mean length of 365 days and 6 hours, it now had 365 days, 5 hours, 49  minutes and 12 seconds. (Sounds a bit like a new directive coming from Brussels. Doesn’t it?) At different times the world gradually adopted the new Gregorian Calendar. However, for calculating when Easter should be celebrated, the Orthodox Christians stuck rigidly to the old Julian Calendar. This is what causes the calculations to yield different results.

For the Greeks, Easter is far more important than the, nowadays, over-commercialised Christmas. The Easter Liturgy is celebrated on Saturday night. The dawn of Sunday is quite dramatic. A little before midnight the lights go out. All the members of the congregation are holding a previously purchased large candle. At midnight a lantern is brought from behind the altar. The nearest candles are lit and the people holding them turn and offer light to their neighbours and in no time at all everyone in the congregation is holding a lit candle. It makes me think of a demonstration of multi-level marketing.

The flame has been flown over from Jerusalem where year after year the miracle of the holy fire has been enacted for centuries when the Greek Orthodox Patriarch enters the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Saturday and a miraculously-arising blue light fires up unlit oil lamps and some candles that he has brought in. Nowadays lanterns lit from this self-igniting flame are flown to Orthodox churches round the world. Jews and Muslims claim it to be fraudulent. To Greeks it is a sign of confirmation of “Correct praise/faith” (the literal meaning of Orthodoxy).

My impression is that while the Catholics concentrate on the sufferings of Christ and the Stations of the Cross, the Greeks are far more focussed on the joy of the resurrection. After midnight, as the priest repeatedly comes round proffering incense, he is literally shouting with joy “Christos Anesti” (Christ is risen). The midnight service finishes with a procession outside round the church, everyone still holding his candle and when it is all over,  groups of friends and relations, all decked out in their Sunday extra best will gather round and wish each other “Χρόνια πολλά” and “Χριστός ανέστη” (Christ is risen) to which the traditional reply is  “Αληθώς ανέστη” (he is truly risen).

As in the West, eggs play a prominent role at Easter time.  Eggs have been used as symbols of life and fertility for a long time back in history. The Jews use a hard-boiled egg dipped in salt water in the Seder Passover. The ancient Persians painted eggs for Nowrooz (still celebrated by the Kurds), their New Year which takes place at the Spring Equinox). You will all be familiar with the chocolate form that Easter eggs take in the UK.

In Greece and Cyprus , eggs are hard-boiled and dyed to celebrate Easter. In other Orthodox countries like Russia and Bulgaria they are intricately painted. Greeks use different colours, but predominantly red, representing the blood of Christ. There is a tradition reminiscent of a game of conkers,  whereby one person holds out  a painted egg in his left hand and another person strikes it with another egg saying “Christos Anesti” (Christ is risen). Then he holds his egg out and the other person strikes it saying “Alithos Anesti”(truly he is risen). The person with more of his egg intact wins.