With the celebration of Epiphany or The Lights (Ta Fota), the festive season comes to an end on Twelfth Night. It is also the time to take down all the Christmas decorations.
We spent the day in the seaside resort of Makrygialos, Pieria. As you can see in the picture below, a lot of people turned out to attend the ceremony and on such a beautiful day where temperatures were around 16oC.
The priest conducts the liturgy while the boatman, the caged doves and even a dog who has paddled out to the boat, are all waiting for the marine part of the ceremony to begin.
What is being celebrated is the revelation of
God incarnate, Jesus being identified as the Son of God. According to the
gospels of Matthew 3:16 and Luke 3:22, ‘ ..and the Holy Spirit descended upon
him in bodily form like a dove..’ So our three white birds are there to symbolise
the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
January 6th also celebrates the
baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan, while Western Christians also identify
this as the Adoration of the Magi, the day the three kings came bearing
gifts.
This Orthodox ceremony is a traditional one,
but today we have a drone overseeing the procedure – the Fota goes
hi-tech!
Below we can see the priest throwing the wooden cross into the ocean - said to symbolize the act of baptism and the cleansing of the waters.
I’m quite proud of this shot - you can see the swimmers compete to catch the cross but you can also see one of the doves fly off to freedom!
It’s particularly nice to see young people follow the tradition and dignify the event by proudly wearing their national costume – in this case, the dress of the Pontioi, Pontic Greeks who colonized the area around the Black Sea.
But the last word we leave to the priest, the local archimandrdrites, a celibate priest whose rank is one below that of a bishop. Here this senior priest-monk, in his finery, holds the blessed cross and the icon before the faithful to kiss.
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