Carnival, Easter and a Canine Acquaintance

Today’s posting marks 29th February, our Leap Year Day- and it’s about time we had a new posting as my previous one still sports a Christmas tree! We have just celebrated Kathara Devtera - Clean Monday - the Orthodox equivalent of Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, marking the beginning of the Sarakosti - Orthodox Lent. This is the period of fasting , commemorating Christ’s fast in the wilderness, a period which extends beyond the proscribed 40 days, running, as it does, into the Holy Week, immediately prior to Orthodox Easter.

How do we account for the different Easters: the ‘Western’ and the Orthodox? Essentially we follow the mode of calculating the Passover according to the Jewish calendar, traditionally celebrated on the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Thus Easter Sunday was the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. So far, so clear, but the Easter date differentiation depends mainly on astronomical issues rather than spiritual ones. Calculation had traditionally been done according to the Julian calendar, established in 46 BC, which added a leap day every four years to reconcile the calendar year with the astronomical one, which is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds! Though this introduction improved things, it meant that every 128 days we would be a day out in calendar terms. The Gregorian calendar was introduced in the 16th century to reduce this variance by amending the Julian leap year rule so that years whose number could be divided by 100 but not by 400 were not afforded leap days. This reduction in the number of leap years brought calendars closer to the astronomical reality – it now takes 3,600 years to be a day behind!

Without going into the Meletian calendar and further complications of concepts such as the ecclesiastical full moon and the paschal full moon; the astronomical equinox and the fixed equinox; in practical terms we can say that the Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian one, a fact that has little relevance for the daily lives of most of us. However, there are still those who follow the Julian calendar for church festivities and so, for example, some residents of our local village, Vasilika, who are ‘of the old calendar’, celebrate Christmas on January 7th. Orthodox Easter calculations follow the Julian calendar, plotting the equinox on April 3rd, 13 days after the established 21st March. This year, with the first post-equinox full moon being on Friday April 6th, we should really be sharing Easter on the same week-end. Ah, but we must also consider the Council of Nicaea in 325 whose ruling has been interpreted as stating that Orthodox Easter cannot fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover …. and so it falls one week later. Just for the record, Western and Orthodox Easters have recently coincided in 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010 and 2011. They will be shared in 2014 and in 2017, but plan your Easter holidays carefully : their next coincidence will not be until 2034!
So there we are – Clean Monday, marking the end of Carnival, which has an interesting etymology: Carne : meat, flesh , as in Chilli con Carne where the dish is so spicy that the seasoning takes precedence over the meat; carnivore : a meat-eater.
Now we can have two interpretations for the Vale : according to Chambers Dictionary it could be from the Latin ‘levare’ to put away; my preference is from the Latin leave-taking ‘Vale’ , so we say farewell to meat – Carnevale!


This year the huge, annual carnival in Moschato, Athens was not celebrated because of the economic crisis. Vera, we miss your compatriots who used to whizz over from Rio to lead the procession of decorated floats and costumed revellers. How, fresh from the Brazilian summer, they endured our cold climes in their scanty costumes, I’ll never know. But I imagine their constant, rapid, rhythmic steps, rather than being an expression of celebration and excitement, were more of a circulatory necessity! Here we had biting winds and snow on the ground and we didn’t venture out to see local celebrations. Dressed very demurely (!!) and with muted revelry, we ate indoors.

Our main focus is on food; fasting food rather than fast food : lettuce, broccoli, spring onions and olives – all our own produce ! – along with squid, mushrooms a la Jamie Oliver, beans – home-baked, not tinned ones, all sorts of pickles,roasted aubergine,taramasalata and laghana, the traditional unleavened bread. So in the bread and in Pascha, the Greek name for Easter, we see Passover parallels, Pesach being the Hebrew word for Passover.

Just over two months ago H and I saw an apparition! From the road-side rose this spectre, whose shocking image truly haunted me for days. It was a being – barely recognizable as a dog and of indeterminate sex - covered as it was by a very dirty, long coat, covered in dried mud, dust and faeces. It was a ‘bag-dog’, doomed to constantly carry around all its ‘possessions’, like it or not. It had risen up from the dried grasses a few days before Christmas, and so its grey, ghostly appearance immediately made me dub it Marley, the ghost in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. Apparently this character was based on a real person, a Jacob Marley, born in 1785, who was to become an insensitive, immoral banker …..Can that be……? His ghost was weighed down by great lengths of chain, each link of which represented an unrepented sin. Our creature was weighed down by matted mop of such length and hemp-like texture that I decided that his nomenclature was doubly fitting, similar as his dreadlocks were to those of the Rastafarian songsmith, Bob Marley. Marley taught me the full semantic force of the term ‘hang-dog’. As we regularly made food-delivery stops at his ‘spot’, he gradually learned to gingerly approach us, but always with an awkward gait and a cowed, dejected expression that could eat at your heart.

Marley was ‘adopted’ by workers at a nearby warehouse who made sure he had water, shared some of their food with him and locked him in the yard at nights and at week-ends, thus protecting him from nearby speeding traffic, the sound of which still makes him jump in fright.
But one day in January, H could bear his predicament no longer and resolved that Marley’s coat was for the chop. That was when a minor miracle happened: not only did he accept H’s coming close and wielding scissors, but the dog welcomed his clipper, tugging at his tangle with his teeth as if to assist in the process! He also licked H’s hand to express appreciation. To see the mound of clippings was unbelievable ....as was the change in his demeanour: after being cropped he stood more erect and with a definite degree of dignity!

Marley wags his tail as he spies our now-familiar car and readily comes to us, extending a paw, requesting attention. He will leave food untasted while we are there for his preference is that we pet and pat him. What he doesn’t know is that once the weather warms up, H is planning a new experience for him- a good wash! We haven’t worked out exactly how that will happen but I really look forward to clapping a fragrant, immaculate Marley.


May we all enjoy this, our ‘extra’, day and may the month of March hold all manner of good things for us : Kalo mas mena!