Christ always rises Saturday at midnight. But this Easter eve He rose at 11. The priest in the Greek seaside village where my uncle has a cottage had too many other villages to visit. The announcement of the time change was made during siesta by a buzzy voice from a megaphone-wielding pickup truck. We slept through the proclamation–or maybe we dismissed it, assuming it was the usual traveling salesman hawking melons or cleaning implements.
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The beginning of the NATO air strikes had coincided with preparations for Orthodox Easter, the most important holiday in Greece–and surely in Serbia too. One Greek TV anchor concluding his Easter report–with its scenes of lambs roasting on spits, outdoor dancing, and the Easter egg game–said this: “How unfair it is that we here are having such a good time and our Serbian friends suffer so much.” On Orthodox “Big” Friday, a week after the West’s Good Friday, one Greek newspaper’s front page offered large color photos of smiling Hillary and Bill making their Easter address to the world. Behind them were two people in goofy-looking bunny outfits. Need I mention that “irony” is a Greek word? So is “sarcasm.”
Before we left for Greece I’d learned that the front pages of certain Greek newspapers carried images of Clinton with a Hitler mustache. In my grandparents’ Athens neighborhood, graffiti continued this theme. One red scribble said in English, “Wanted: Dr. Adolph Clinton, for Murder.” Another said “USA,” with a swastika replacing the S. Some of these scribbles were signed “KKE,” the Greek Communist Party. One day at dusk we drove past the American embassy, a site of turmoil for decades. Behind a tall fence of spiked metal, it looks like a corporate fortress. About 50 Greek police in riot gear stood in scattered groups, smoking and making conversation, awaiting the protest that would take place later in the evening. We watched it on television at my uncle’s house in the suburbs.
On the way to my uncle’s seaside cottage to celebrate Easter, we stopped in a village for supplies. We picked up a butchered baby goat at a shop decorated with skinned and gutted lambs and kids. They hung in rows from the roof, hooks in their heels, depositing puddles of blood on the sidewalk. At the next shop we chose a Chinese-made motor over a Greek motor and a hand crank to turn our spit. On this, a day when Greeks prepared to rest and feast, we noticed three or four Albanian men who’d come to the square hoping to be hired for odd jobs. Now as common as old men in coffee shops, Albanian men collect each morning in village squares throughout Greece. I juxtaposed the sight of them with the familiar television images of displaced Kosovars in refugee camps. To Greeks, those desperate masses represent not only pain and pathos but more hungry Albanians in Greece.
After missing Christ’s rise at 11 PM, my furious uncle led most of the family up the mountain in his SUV to another village where He would rise at the usual hour. The rest of us stayed behind to watch the patriarch of Constantinople celebrate the resurrection in Hagia Sophia on television. We set the table and heated up the celebratory lamb intestine stew, arranged the red Easter eggs, and readied the bread. When the others returned, they reported that up the mountain the blasts had been even more terrifying.
