Our Big Fat Greek Engagement Party

(Click on the photos to make them bigger.)

(The mathematical formula Eleni worked out for the wedding is: E squared plus 10 cubed equals double happiness.)

On Friday Sept. 3, the Taylor Rental guys brought the tent (20 by 60 feet long) and assembled it in our back field just as other citizens of Massachusetts were boarding up their windows in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Earl. Dan, who does our mowing, had spent a week cutting down blackberry bushes and chopping limbs off trees to make room for it.

Because daughter Eleni will be marrying her fiancé Emilio on the Greek island of Corfu on 10-10-10, we wanted to throw an engagement party over the Labor Day weekend at our home to share the joy with family and friends who couldn’t travel to Greece in October.

We invited about 200 people, suspecting that many would be away for the holiday weekend, but by the time the tent was going up, 176 people had told us they were coming from as far away as Arizona, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Miami and lots from New York.



A million things could have gone wrong, including the hurricane, but they didn’t. I forgot to put floating candles in the pool and tiny blue flowers around the cake, but it didn’t matter . Everyone has been e-mailing for a week, posting photos on Facebook and saying how they loved the party because it was authentically Greek and so full of joy.

Eleni wanted a celebration (and a wedding) that was not grand but put together by her family and friends, saying “It takes a village to plan a wedding.” And that’s what happened.

Her sister Marina designed the intertwined E’s (for Eleni and Emilio) that became the logo, written on everything from the invitations (also designed and printed by Marina) to the cake and the favors (boubonnieres in Greek)—filled with Jordan almonds.



Marina managed to get the logo embroidered on handkerchiefs and then Big Eleni labored many days and nights turning the handkerchiefs, ribbons and candy into 200 favors which awaited the guests on the tables under the tent.

Eleni and Emilio chose a blue and white wedding because those are the colors of both the Greek and the Nicaraguan flags. (Emilio is from Nicaragua.) I assembled the centerpieces of hydrangeas (and flags) on the morning of the party and criss-crossed the 17 tables under the tent with ribbons.



As people drove up, one of Eleni’s cousins, Nick, and his son, Evan directed the parking. In the pool area, the wait staff were ready with welcome drinks, including the “Blissini” that Eleni chose-- prosecco, orange and pomegranate juice, and two pomegranate seeds each (because, as my husband, Nick, pointed out, in Greece pomegranates symbolize good luck and fruitfulness.)

Under our grape arbor was a small table holding the wedding bands and an icon of Christ. Our priest, Father Dean, aided by Father Greg, spoke the prayers for the blessing of the rings, then the couple exchanged the bands, putting them on their left hands. (On the wedding day, they will switch them to the right as is done in Greece.) Governor Mike Dukakis and Kitty were among the guests watching the blessing.



After Nick, the Father of the Bride, made some remarks honoring the young couple, he invited everyone to sit in the tent outside in the field. Nearby, the 24-foot-long buffet table was loaded with Greek dishes prepared by the catering staff of Aliki and Anastasios Benisis, owners of Ciao Bella restaurant.

There was a separate table groaning with lavishly decorated trays of sweets brought by many of the Greek ladies—baklava, kataifi, revenni. When the party was over everyone went home clutching high-calorie “goodie bags”. Below, the Big Eleni is giving a box of sweets to Mike and Kitty Dukakis.



On the dessert table was a cake with the intertwined E’s made—at Eleni’s request—by Evie, the Cake Lady who works in a red barn down the road, and who has made just about every birthday cake we’ve served.



After comments by me (the M.O.B.) and the groom, the DJ, George Regan, played “You’re just too good to be true”—the Frankie Valli song that will be the couple’s first dance in Corfu. They showed us the steps they’ve learned so far, then the DJ changed to Greek music and the crowd launched into line-dancing worthy of Zorba the Greek. Eleni’s Aunt Kanta led the dance, looking lovely in a blue dress she wore exactly 40 years ago when Nick and I were wed.



I remember our big fat Greek wedding in Worcester 40 years ago, which was attended by eight Presbyterian WASPs (from my Minnesota family) and about 300 Greeks. It went on for three days, but Eleni and Emilio’s wedding will be three celebrations spread over two continents and six weeks.



Part two will happen on Oct. 6, when the hardiest of the Corfu-bent wedding guests will party in the inn in Nick’s mountaintop village of Lia in Northern Greece.)

It will all culminate, God willing, on Corfu on 10-10-10 at the foot of the Crusader castle overlooking the harbor.

I think what made the engagement party so memorable was all the love for Eleni and Emilio that was gathered under that tent, from their friends, family and the members of the community who worked so hard to make it wonderful.

As Eleni said, it takes village to plan a wedding.

Grecian Festival Poster Tries

In Worcester MA, the biggest, best and most famous ethnic festival is the Grecian Festival held every other spring by Saint Spyridon Cathedral. It’s been happening for 34 years and brings more than 25,000 people to enjoy the fabulous food and festivities.

For all those years the poster was designed by award-winning artist Alexander Gazonas, who passed away several years ago. In 2008, the entire festival was dedicated to his memory. That year’s poster, based on the famous statue the Charioteer of Delphi, was his last design.

So this year a call went out for local artists to attempt a poster design for the festival, which will be held on June 4, 5 and 6. I submitted three poster tries – the rough drafts are above. The top one was based on an archaic pottery design showing a man playing a double flute while a woman dances, holding castanets in her hands. (I had to cover up their nudity a little—after all, this is a family event!)

The second design is a detail of a watercolor I painted last year showing three priests whom I photographed dancing at a summer festival near my husband’s village of Lia in the Mourgana mountains of Epiros in northern Greece, just below the border with Albania. The white-bearded man on the right is our village priest, Father Procopi. (Actually, he covers three villages and is very busy. Until recently he traveled from one village to the other by foot. Now he has a car.)

The third design is based on a classical head of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty.

I was very pleased when the committee selected my first design—the dancing couple—for this year’s official poster. At the bottom you see the final, finished poster as it was polished up by Sarah Kyriazis of New Market Media.

If you are anywhere near Worcester MA on June 4, 5 or 6 be sure to come by. You‘ll think you’ve been transported to Athens.

Here are some of the reasons you should visit: Greek music, food, (baklava! souvlaki!) dancers, Greek goodies for sale, including jewelry, crafts, books, clothing, icons and more. There’s a living museum and a kids fest, and on Sunday evening a raffle drawing. The minute you walk in, you’ll be filled with the uniquely Hellenic high spirits which in Greek are called kefi!

Dukakis At Eleni's Memorial, Lia Greece

Michael Dukakis, who ran for the presidency of the United States in 1988 and was the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history, arrived in the small northern Greek village of Lia last week on Aug. 24, causing great excitement throughout the country, and especially in Lia, where the village had been spruced up, pot holes filled, foliage pruned, and a heliport repaved to receive Dukakis' entourage, (although the man himself chose to drive up the vertiginous mountain roads so he could see the countryside on the way.)

Dukakis' maternal grandparents came from Vrisohori, another small and, until recently, isolated village not far from Lia. Although Mike and Kitty have visited Greece many times, they had never visited Northern Greece and his grandparents' village. The couple, along with Kitty's sister Ginnie and Ginnie's husband, Al, used the Grand Serai Hotel in Ioannnina as a base. After a lavish dinner hosted by the Mayor of Ioannina, they left the next day to see Vrisohori where Sen. Dukakis, with tears in his eyes, lauded the village which had produced his mother Euterpe, who became one of the the first Greek-American women to earn a college degree. (The small village also produced the father of film director John Cassavetes.)

The next day, Monday, Aug. 24, the Dukakis group arrived in Lia to attend a memorial service for Eleni Gatzoyiannis, my mother-in-law and the mother of my husband Nicholas Gage

Eleni Gatzoyiannis was executed by a firing squad of Communist guerrillas in Aug. 1948-- her body left in a ravine along with 12 other murdered civilians. Before that day, she was imprisoned, crowded along with 31 other prisoners into the tiny basement of her own house--which had been taken over as guerrilla headquarters.

When the guerrillas, who occupied the village in the last months of the Greek Civil War, started collecting children to take them behind the Iron Curtain, Eleni began to plan a nighttime escape for her own children. (In the end 28,000 children were kidnapped in the pedomasoma.) The escape succeeded after two abortive tries--but on the third try, she was forced to stay behind, to provide two women from her household to harvest wheat for the guerrillas. She chose herself and her 15-year-old daughter Glykeria, and said goodbye to her nine-year-old son, Nicholas and three older daughters. After her children disappeared, Eleni was questioned, tortured,imprisoned and ultimately executed on Aug. 28, 1948.

Nick's book about his mother, «Eleni», has told her story around the world in 34 languages. It was followed by the film Eleni. Her sacrifice to gain freedom for her children was cited on national television by President Ronald Reagan.

Last week, 61 years after Eleni’s execution, Michael and Kitty Dukakis attended a memorial service in her honor in Aghios Demetrios Church, where she worshipped, and where her remains were placed in the ossuary after her body was recovered from the ravine where she fell.

Also at the church last week were survivors and descendents of the 12 other civilians who died that day. After the service, mourners were given the traditional kollyva to eat--a sweet combination of boiled wheat, pomegranate seeds, almonds, sugar and raisins-- to symbolize the resurrection and immortality of the soul.

From the church, Mike and Kitty Dukakis came up the mountain to see Eleni's house as it is now--rebuilt from ruins in 2002 by our daughter and Eleni's granddaughter, author Eleni Gage. (She spent a year in the village restoring the house and writing a travel memoir "North of Ithaka" about the experience.) The house has been decorated to look just as it did before the Civil War. On the mantle is a photograph of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her husband Christos--who was working as a produce seller in Worcester when war broke out in 1939, preventing him from returniing to Greece for the next decade.

Nick then showed the Dukakises his grandfather's house, lower on the mountain, and the path that the children took when they escaped down through the minefields at night, until they reached the Nationalist soldiers on the other side. They were sent to a refugee camp where they lived until their father was able to bring them to the United States a year later.

Finally, the villagers of Lia gathered with Mike and Kitty Dukakis in the village Inn for a celebratory meal, including the traditional local pita pies. There were tears as well as smiles as Mike and Kitty greeted and hugged the villagers, old and young, who had lost loved ones and grandparents on that day in 1948.

Nick welcomed the visitors, saying in part «I’m very moved that Mike and Kitty Dukakis have come here to remember the fate of Eleni and to recall how she suffered and from whom.»

In turn Gov. Dukakis, also speaking in Greek, said «Having read several times the powerful work of Nicholas Gage about his mother, we are are very moved to come to Lia and see the places of her martyrdom.»

This celebration of her legacy--the legacy of a simple Greek peasant woman who died to save her children--was something that Eleni Gatzoyiannis, murdered at 41, could never have imagined happening 61 years after her death. Hundreds gathered in her village as she was honored by the only Greek-American to run for the presidency of the United States--the country she longed to see, but never did. (After Nick's father Christos died in 1985, Nick brought his mother's bones to Worcester, MA to be buried next to her husband, in Hope Cemetery)

It was an honor that Eleni Gatzoyiannis could not have imagined when she was alive --but the spirit of Eleni has often been felt in the village over the years since her death, as people from around the world have made the pilgrimage to see where she lived and died.

I think she knew.

People, Places and Puppets that Pull Me Back to Greece

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them)


I’ve been traveling to Greece for the past 40 years (and lived there between 1977 and 1982 when our children were small) and every year certain places and people keep turning up in my photos. When I get back home some of those people and places end up in my paintings. And then I know I’ll go back to find them again.

Two years ago Eleni and I were in Mykonos taking photos at the fish and produce market in the harbor and I painted a particularly animated vegetable seller who was overwhelming his elderly customer with the sales pitch for his tomatoes. I liked that painting so much I used it on my business cards.

This year, about a month ago, we were back in Mykonos for a wedding and found the same manavis (produce seller) in the same spot wearing the same hat. I showed him the card and he insisted that we take more photos of himself and his fellow produce seller Yiorgos. The two men told us sadly that the elderly customer in my painting, named Manoussis, had passed away. The next day Eleni gave those two the photos she took and I promised to mail Mr. Yiannis, the guy in the hat, copies of the painting. We learned that his friend, Yiorgos, has talents beside selling produce—he was one of the musicians playing the accordion at the wedding.

The man playing the lyra—a rare instrument native to Crete —is Yiannis Demarchoyiannis, well into his eighties, the unofficial mayor of his mountainous village of Axos in Crete. He came up to us in the village coffee shop two years ago, and asked if he could join us to practice his English. “You look so young,” he said to me, full of Cretan flattery and charm, “that I thought you were brothers.”

Yiannis insisted we come to his barber shop where he served us pears and his homemade raki (moonshine) and played and sang to us mantadas—the Cretan songs which the singer makes up on the spot in rhyming couplets to suit the occasion. “Take me to New York as your bar-bear,” he sang to Eleni, “and I will style your golden hair.”

This month I took a photograph (above) of the bell tower of the church of Aghias Paraskevis in my husband Nick’s village of Lia, next to the village Inn. The painting is one I did on the same spot many years ago when it was early spring and the Judas trees were in bloom all over the mountain.

Every time we go to Nick’s village, on the Albanian border in northern Greece, we start by flying from Athens to Ioannina, the provincial capital, which was under Turkish rule until 1913. Its most infamous ruler was Ali Pasha who entertained Lord Byron and made a habit of drowning women from his harem and anyone else who annoyed him in the deep lake.

Every time we’re in Ioannina we eat at one of the outdoor restaurants on the lake shore and I always take a photo from the restaurant toward a mosque in the walled Turkish city –now the demotic museum. I’ve painted this scene several times over the years. In the painting above you can see the snow that remains on the mountaintops well into spring. On our recent trip, the snow was gone and I shot the scene with a rose in the foreground.

Every time we’re in Athens we drop by the “Icon guy” as we call him in a tremendously crowded little shop near the Cathedral – at 20 Apollonos, in Plaka. His name is Stavros Tassis and he is a true folk artist who compulsively glues bright cardboard icons all over things—a bread board, a door, a priest’s hat, a chair, a wooden drawer from a bureau—and then distresses it to make it look old. His work always is religious in theme, although he includes small non-religious objects in his eclectic works of art. He is also the source of most of our collection of Greek shadow puppets, the karaghiozi—who are often painted on camel skin and still can be seen in the shadow puppet shows that delight the children in Greek towns and amuse the adults with their satire.

Thanks to the icon guy, who can find almost any puppet you want by rooting around in the bowels of his shop, we have decorated the walls in our house in the village and our porch in Massachusetts with shadow puppets—and it’s really hard to find the authentic hand-painted and signed originals outside of a museum any more.

This year I dropped in to see the icon guy on my last day in Athens. He was muttering about spilling paint on the floor of his shop. (How he can even see the floor is a mystery, the place is so crowded.)

I knew that the greatest of the Karaghiozi puppeteers Evgenios Spatharis, had died a month before at the age of 85. The icon guy showed me a painting he made as a tribute to the great man. He had written on it “Great teacher, the angels are waiting for the great performance”. Then he listed three late, great puppeteers: 1. Spatharis, 2. Kouzaros, and 3. Antonaros.

I hope it’s true that they’re all together with their puppets behind a lighted screen, delighting the child and adult angels in Heaven. That’s a performance I’d to see.