Greek Easter

Greek Easter was certainly different for us this year but we tried our best to celebrate it the same way you guys would have back home.

Nektarios and i went to St Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Church on Moscow Road in Bayswater (along with 10,000 other Greek Londoners!).

After the Friday night service, we walked down the street to head home and we stopped at this guy who was selling Greek Easter sweets from the roof of his car. It was so funny, we just had to buy a few things. You can see the pics below:

Greek sweets on top of the car (true Greek style)

  

These were no where near as good as our mum’s, yaiyai’s or thea’s, but it was better than nothing.

Then on Saturday, we went to our friend Vera’s house to do some traditional Easter cooking. Vera is Bulgarian but they still have the same Easter as us and all the sweets are very similar. Vera even made a bread called kuzunak which is very similar to soureki. We also attempted to dye some eggs. They actually worked out preety good. Haha well i thought it was great for our first attempt anyway.

 

Here are a few snaps of our egg colouring process:

 

 

 

It felt so great to sit down and eat after all that cooking (haha not that we did very much).

Church on Sunday night was amazing. In the begining Nektarios and i were stuck down a little alley way to the side of the Church. There were just so many people we couldn’t move anywhere. It was crazy, costrophobic and cold. We comtemplated leaving because we could hear or see anything, but im so glad we didn’t. Once the candles spread around, everyone started to go home and we were lucky enough to get a actual seat inside the Church.

There was about 10 priests at the Easter service and it was very interesting to watch . I know it’s a bit cheeky but we actully got some footage of the service. I felt bad using my camera inside the Church but there were lots of other people doing it as well. Keep a look out for my next post i will try to upload the video on here so you can see it too.

  

When we got home, Nektarios and I looked at each other not really knowing what to do. Normally we would have gone back to someones house to celebrate Easter with the whole family. Eat patsa and drakhana, crack eggs and go home to bed in order to wake up for lunch the next day.

Nektarios was extreemly disappointed that he could not eat (and that i did not know how to make) drakhana, but at least we had eggs 🙂

Nektarios blessed our little flat and i prayed that the fire alarm didn’t go off to wake the neighbours at 4 o’clock in the morning 🙂