Christmas Day of the Summer

One supermarket question, 9,792 churches, a thousand chapels, 920 Peloponnese celebrations—and the day Greece moves somewhere else.

Thursday night, August 13, I turned to Karen.

“Anything else we want to add to OurGroceries?”

OurGroceries is an app we use that keeps reminding us what we need before Sunday morning arrives and one of us opens the refrigerator.

“Honey, we’re out of milk.”

As an organized Greek, I don’t have just one shopping list.

I have Supermarket.

Farmer’s Market.

TETAS — our nut gal.

Spinos — our coffee roaster.

Farmakeio.

And more.

At this point, grocery shopping has become less of a household chore and more of a supply-chain operation.

There is a reason for this.

In Greece, you learn fairly quickly that Sunday morning is not the ideal time to discover that you are out of milk.

Do you like your coffee black?

Supermarkets are generally closed on Sundays.

There are exceptions, of course, particularly in tourist areas and parts of Athens.

But here in Kalamata, Sunday shopping usually involves finding a mini market or a bloated periptero, improvising, or simply accepting that you should have planned better.

Which is why, on Thursday night, I was reviewing the lists.

“We should make sure we have everything,” I told Karen. “Everything will be closed Saturday.”

“Why?”

“Because Saturday is August 15th.”

She looked at me.

“We can go Saturday.”

“No, we can’t. Everything will be closed.”

Karen picked up her phone.

This is rarely a positive development when we disagree about something.

A few seconds later:

“AB is open.”

“What?”

She turned the phone toward me.

Google showed our AB Vassilopoulos on Kritis Street open Saturday.

Regular hours.

I stared at it.

“That can’t be right.”

“There it is.”

“But Saturday is August 15th.”

“You are such a drama queen.”

I have been married long enough to recognize when it is time to use the escape hatch.

“Okay. Maybe. But I’d rather go tomorrow. Saturday will probably be busy.”

Notice what had just happened.

I had gone from:

Everything in Greece will be closed.

to:

I am merely concerned about traffic patterns.

Seamlessly.

The next day I stopped at The Mart.

At the checkout, I asked the cashier whether they would be open Saturday.

She looked at me as though I had asked whether they planned to remain open Christmas morning.

“No.”

“Everything is closed?”

“Of course.”

Then she explained it to me in one sentence.

“The fifteenth is the Christmas Day of the summer.”

Ah.

There it was.

Not:

It’s a public holiday.

Not:

The supermarket will be closed.

Christmas Day.

Of the summer.

Suddenly my milk emergency seemed considerably less important.

I knew August 15 was important.

I’m Greek.

I grew up here.

I knew about the Dormition of the Virgin Mary — the Κοίμηση της Θεοτόκου — one of the great feast days of the Orthodox Church.

I knew people went to church.

I knew villages held πανηγύρια.

I knew Greeks named Maria, Panagiotis, Panagiota, Despina and others connected to the Virgin Mary had a very busy telephone day ahead of them.

What I had apparently forgotten was the scale of the thing.

So I went home and did what I always do when I realize I don’t understand something about the country where I was born.

I started Googling Greece.

This is usually a mistake.

The first number I found was:

9,792.

Nine thousand.

Seven hundred.

Ninety-two.

That is the figure given for parish and monastery churches in Greece.

For a country of roughly ten million people.

And apparently 9,792 doesn’t count all the little ones.

Then I checked Tinos.

This is the island where thousands of Orthodox faithful gather every August 15 at the Church of Panagia Evangelistria to honor the Dormition of the Virgin Mary.

Tinos alone has more than 1,000 chapels.

One island.

More than a thousand chapels.

Population: 8,934.

That works out to roughly:

one chapel for every nine residents.

At that point I stopped trying to count churches.

Naturally, I moved on to πανηγύρια.

Panigyria.

This did not improve matters.

Because August 15 isn’t celebrated the same way everywhere.

Every island and village seems to have looked at one of the biggest religious holidays in Greece and said:

Yes, but what can we add?

On Amorgos, people arrive at the celebration at Panagia Panochoriani on donkeys.

Afterward there is food and rakomelo.

That seems fair.

If I have traveled to church by donkey, I feel I have earned the rakomelo.

On Serifos, the Xylopanagia celebration lasts three days.

Tradition says that the couple who opens the first dance around the large olive tree beside the church will be married within the year.

I am assuming unmarried couples are advised to consider their seating arrangements carefully.

On Nisyros, the celebration of Panagia Spiliani lasts:

nine days.

Nine.

Days.

Apparently at some point somebody on Nisyros heard the phrase “long weekend” and regarded it as a lack of ambition.

On Lesvos, pilgrims traditionally walk about 25 kilometers from Mytilene to Agiassos for the celebration of Panagia Agiasotissa.

Twenty-five kilometers.

On foot.

I assume whoever suggested this was not carrying the cooler.

Then we get to Kefalonia.

Every year around August 15, small snakes appear at the church of Panagia Lagouvarda in Markopoulo.

Of course they do.

The Holy Snakes of Kefalonia: Why do the “Agiofida” appear only in August?

Because apparently somewhere between:

They are known as the snakes of the Virgin Mary.

They are described as harmless.

People come specifically to see them.

This is where Greece and I temporarily part company.

I trust everyone’s word.

I am not a “snake person.”

I feel no compelling need to verify this at close range.

Because apparently somewhere between:

Then there is Ikaria.

An island already famous for people living a very long time.

Its mid-August panigyria involve dancing, goat meat and strong local red wine.

Perhaps we have finally discovered the longevity program.

By now I thought I had probably learned enough about πανηγύρια.

I had churches.

I had chapels.

I had donkeys.

I had nine-day celebrations.

I had a 25-kilometer pilgrimage.

I had marriage predictions involving an olive tree.

I had goat and strong red wine.

I had snakes.

Surely that was enough.

Then I discovered:

e-panigiria.gr.

Of course I did.

Because apparently Greece has so many πανηγύρια that somebody decided the country needed a website to keep track of them.

You can search by region.

You can search by date.

There is a calendar.

There is a map.

And because a website devoted entirely to telling you where Greek πανηγύρια are taking place was apparently insufficient—

there is an app.

A real one.

E-panigiria.

At this point I began to suspect that I had seriously underestimated the organizational requirements of Greek summer.

So I started scrolling.

And scrolling.

And scrolling.

When I checked the regional archive, it had:

6,017 listings.

Now, to be fair, these are not all strictly religious panigyria.

There are πανηγύρια.

There are γλέντια.

There are ανταμώματα.

There are village gatherings.

There are traditional celebrations.

There are grape festivals.

There are sardine festivals.

There are potato festivals.

There are, apparently, thousands of reasons for Greeks to set up tables, find some musicians and remain awake considerably later than I do.

Then I made the mistake of clicking:

Peloponnese.

Twenty-three pages.

Forty listings per page.

Even the last page was full.

I did the math.

920.

Nine hundred and twenty panigyria, glentia, village feasts and assorted celebrations.

In the Peloponnese alone.

At that point, 9,792 churches started to seem restrained.

And somewhere between the thousand chapels on Tinos, the pilgrims walking across Lesvos, the snakes on Kefalonia and an app capable of directing me toward 920 celebrations in my own part of Greece, I finally began to understand what the cashier meant.

August 15th is not merely a religious holiday.

And it is not merely a day when the supermarket is closed.

It is one of those days when normal Greece seems to pause.

Except Greece doesn’t really pause.

It relocates.

From the supermarket to the village square.

From Athens back to the island.

From work to the family table.

From the city to the church courtyard.

Greece doesn’t close on August 15th.

It moves somewhere else.

Which brings us back to AB.

Google said they would be open.

The cashier at The Mart said the very idea was ridiculous.

Karen said I was a drama queen.

Whether AB is actually open this morning, I have absolutely no intention of driving to Kritis Street to find out.

There are some disagreements a married man should not investigate too aggressively once he has successfully escaped from them.

Besides.

We have milk.