The festivals are an element of social life that should be mentioned is the entertainment in traditional society.
Life in Greece, under Turkish or Venetian rule, is not easy. Work for the peasant was hard and dependent on the weather and the dominant master, the risks to life and property were great, the longing for foreign lands and the adventures of sea life were a regular concern for most Greek populations.
But we should not think that the life of the Greek was monotonous and morose. The strong emotions that moved him were expressed through song, which, however “complaining” it may have been, gave an outlet for his sorrows. In the small societies of the Greek village or the Greek town, the relations of the people, relatives and friends, were close, they lived their joys and sorrows as a group. Births, baptisms, marriages, bereavement, name days were the occasion for gatherings where joy was kindled and sorrow was forgotten. The night work wanted the nights, where singing and riddles flourished. But the greatest opportunities for entertainment in the year were the fairs, held to commemorate the feast of a saint.
Every village has its own festival, one, and often more, some in the village, for the patron saint of the saint, and others in the summer, especially in the chapels, an opportunity for excursions and all-night feasting, from the evening service to the morning mass.
There at the fair, where people from the surrounding villages gathered, there were often commercial transactions, and in many places the fair evolved into a trade fair, where they gathered and sold products from nearby and distant areas, as if to say, a kind of trade fair. It was there that girls and boys still came dressed up in their best, saw each other for the first time and admired each other at the dance, and it was from there that matchmaking often began and ended in weddings.
A key element of the festival, apart from its religious aspect, is the feast. Today, in the festivals that still take place, people eat in the centers, permanent or makeshift, that are set up for a day around the church that is celebrating. In the past, however, the meal was common and was part of a ritual, offered by the church, the community or a few believers.
But the most important thing in all festivals is the dance. In many places, the churchyard is called the choir stalls, precisely because that is where the dance is held on the great festivals. The dance at the festivals is usually accompanied by musicians with various folk instruments, violin, clarinet, lute, drums. But the dancers and others also sing around them. In some festivals the songs were sung verse by verse, first by the men and then by the women. The musicians were paid on the spot, often by sticking coins on their foreheads.
From the book “HELLENIC LACICAL CULTURE” published by ΓΝΩΣΗ
words from tradition
