.My Big Fat Greek Fest

Oakland Greek Festival brings sacred elements to its big feast.

The Oakland Greek Festival happens in May, but the blizzard
of activity began in March. That’s when parishioners from the Ascension
Greek Orthodox Cathedral started cooking all the spinach pies,
vegetable medleys, stuffed grape leaves, salatas, and meatballs
that fill their festival menu. “There’s so much food to cook that they
need a schedule. Every week they cook a different thing,” said Kathryn
Doyle, who helps organize the event. What results is a dizzying
Mediterranean feast: dolmathes, chicken baked with lemon and
oregano, fat juicy olives, kouloura bread, deep-fried smelts,
loukaniko (Greek sausage) on pita bread, fish plaki
(Pacific snapper and baked vegetables), filo-dough pastries, gyros,
buttery baklava with nuts and honey, lamb sandwiches, lamb shanks in
tomato sauce, and roughly a dozen kind of fresh pastries (they bake the
pastries last). They fry up the calamari that weekend and roast one
lamb on a spit each day.

No surprise that the food is the main draw, since it constitutes
such a big production. During the three-day weekend, Ascension members
reconfigure their church into a nexus of food booths, along with an
estiatorion (dining room with a food line), kafenion (tea
room with coffee and pastries), and a taverna (bar that sells
wine and microbrews). Greeks definitely know how to eat, and they also
know how to throw a good party. The Oakland Festival features nonstop
music and dancing, with a lineup of professional groups performing
alongside homegrown folk dancers from the church. Children at the
Orthodox church apparently start dancing at a very young age and
continue all the way through college. Their mothers sew costumes that
reveal ancestral ties to specific Greek villages, each of which has its
own “look.” Some kids stick with it, learn all the choreography, and
compete in such prestigious events as the San Francisco Diocese Folk
Dance Festival. Others just participate in the open line, where
everyone holds hands and the yia yias dance with the little
children.

Religion and cultural pride are slippery concepts, but the Orthodox
Greeks give them a lot of latitude. (Doyle said they’ve managed to
squelch all hard feelings from the great schism between the Eastern
Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, which happened about a thousand
years ago). The Oakland Greek festival is, indeed, a celebration of
religious identity, with liturgical choirs and vendors hawking sacred
artifacts along with secular souvenirs. It’s also a place that welcomes
the wider community of Oakland, Doyle said, noting that of the 1,200
families who currently belong to Ascension, many are non-Greek
converts. Celebrations like this one might draw in many more. Friday
through Sunday, May 15-17, at Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the
Ascension
(4700 Lincoln Ave., Oakland). $6. OaklandGreekFestival.com

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