You can believe, or not believe. But you can't fail to be immersed in the spirit of Easter in Greece.
It's the most important holiday in the Greek Orthodox calendar: a bigger to-do than Christmas. The Greeks, as we know, invented theatre – and Easter is a giant, living, breathing, immortal piece of it. From Athens, the spectacle spans to the tiniest of the 160 permanently inhabited islands, and everyone is into it. So don't go looking for a party-mate at 11 p.m. on Easter Saturday. Virtually the entire country will be in church.
The island of Paros does Easter better than anywhere else. It's the third largest in the Cyclades group, where you'll also find Mykonos and Santorini. Picture whitewashed churches with blue domes, orange blossom and bougainvillea tumbling down nearly every wall, mysteriously interlocking streets with no names that are no wider than the expanse of your outstretched arms, sugar-cube houses piled up on hillsides, or dotted sparsely on the windswept edge of a cliff. Paros's charm feels effortless.
Ordinarily, it has a population of 17,000, but this doubles around Holy Week. Tourists, most of them Greek, arrive for the festivities – especially for the re-enactment of the Passion of Christ. On Good Friday, the hillside village of Marpissa puts on a series of tableaux performed by locals, dramatizing the last days of Christ's life. Acting? Or have we biblically time-travelled? You could almost be fooled into thinking it.
There's a huge build-up to Easter, but it really gets going with the decoration of eggs on Holy Thursday. Families dye the kokkina avga the traditional red (to signify Christ's blood, with the egg representing new life) by boiling the skins of yellow onions in water and vinegar.
‘Experience the ebullient illusion of being the only person swimming in the Aegean.’ pictures this page by Carol Mason for The Globe and Mail
Locals say there are 200 or so churches on the island – many are the size of your master bedroom – and congregants keep an all-night vigil around the epitaphios, the bier that bears a replica of Christ's body. Women adorn it with fresh flowers; great pride is taken.
On Good Friday, a solemnity falls on usually convivial Greeks. Funeral bells ring out all over the island, this mourning melody carries across the swell of the blue Aegean, where brightly painted fishing boats bob alongside the real working boats that feed the island and send the fresh daily catch to the businesses in Athens. Flags fly at half-mast. Even the horn of the Blue Star ferry wails in respectful lament.
From midday on, each church has its bier lying in state. A steady stream of people comes to pay their respects. Many don't stay for the full service, yet in Paroikia, the island's capital, the Church of Our Lady of a Hundred Gates is almost impossible to leave. The strange humming of voices is hypnotic. I watch the course of impenetrable rituals from the open doors, then I sit outside on the step, eyes closed to the sunshine beating on my face, lulled by the sombre rhythm of a language and devotion that I don't understand. I may be the only person not dressed in black.
