Its not often that I say I miss the rituals, the smells and tastes of my homeland and Easter this year which we celebrate this weekend was one such. I have always said I am an outsider looking in. This is a status I am perfectly comfortable with. I have not been born here or raised here. Have no family here. So what connection cannot provide I know I have to find myself. I love the mehlepi and masticha in the traditional Cypriot pastries called flaounes and the sweetness of a tsoureki.

So the next best thing is making them which I thoroughly enjoyed. Are they perfect ? Well not really, but the scent in the kitchen as they baked and their subsequent toasted slices ( some slathered with hot butter and our very own honeycomb ) make this an Easter moment of considerable joy. Easter moment – so what are we talking about here?

Given where I live I wished everyone a Happy Easter – noting Jesus rose last week and will do so again for Greek Easter. I was happy to see that line was taken up by a fellow Greek and his analysis resonated so I have reproduced the article here.

Fotis Kapetopoulos from Neos Kosmos.

The title of the article was “Twice Risen – an Atheists Pascha.
7 April 2026 1:37pm

The great absurdity is I say that I do not believe in God – yet as I age, I take greater joy in Pascha (Passover, or Pecha), Eastern Orthodox Easter. Jesus rises twice in our house — last weekend he rose as a Catholic, and this Sunday at 12am he will rise again.

A house divided, a tradition shared

“It’s not just you guys that have Easter,” my wife said on Friday, digging at our Greek superiority complex. But we know that really, we’re the first, and we have not changed for 2000 years. (I mean Saul, or Paul, had to write to the Corinthians, Thessalonians and Ephesians—if the Greeks didn’t take up the new creed, a kind of Judaism-lite for gentiles, the Romans never would have.)

Anyway, the Spaniards eat on Good Friday, potaje – chickpea and bacalao (codfish) soup, followed by torrijas – Spanish-style French toast.

My very dead, communist father had no time for the church or its clerics; “tools of the state. They always side with power,” he’d say. Yet Pascha had meaning even for him. His name, Anastasios, means resurrection, and Easter Sunday is his name day.

“Jesus was a radical rabbi and a socialist,” he’d say, “he fought against Rome,” and he’d add, “don’t listen to your grandmother, the Romans killed him, not the Jews.”

My mother, an agnostic, took the late 1960s “love is all” view. “Jesus is about love; he was like John Lennon.” So, as a kid, I associated Lennon and Lenin with Jesus.

Inheritance of memory and war

My parents, as kids, lived through the Nazis’ carnival of horror in Greece, and then as teens, the bloody fratricide of the Greek Civil War.

“Where was God when the Nazis burned churches filled with civilians, or when the royalists hung partisans … all these dead were Jesus,” my father would say, loud enough for my grandmother to hear and fume. She’d call him “Atheos” or atheist, one without God.

My grandma sought to “save” my sister and me from my father’s “bad ideas.”

To limit the tension, as a young adult I would remind him how the Archbishop of Athens Damaskinos saved thousands of Greek Jews by Christianising them. So, pissed were the Germans that the vicious SS-Oberführer Jürgen Stroop threatened the archbishop with the firing squad, to which the cleric reminded him, “It is traditional to hang clerics in the Greek church.” The Nazi left in a rage.

As a kid the 40 days of fasting – no meat, no milk, no butter, some fish, and by Holy Week, no animal flesh or animal products – killed me. “What … no Coco Pops!” I’d freak. So, Mum – who naturally loved me so much – secretly fed me milk and Coco Pops in the morning. I could have wasted away as a chubby kid in early 1970s Adelaide if not for Mum.

I now try to fast for my Greek Holy Week … at least not to eat meat.

On ‘Megali Pempti’ I dye eggs red, and my sister makes koulouria. On Saturday night just before midnight, my son and I, and a few others, will attend Anastasi. We’ll arrive just in time, 11.45pm, armed with large candles or lambathes wrapped in foil windbreakers to receive the “holy light.” We’ll join voices in a Byzantine chant to sing “Christos Anesti” or “Christ has risen.” My son, Anastasios, is my old man’s resurrection. He’s never met my father, who died at the age of 62. Residents complain about the noise, traffic, and all the “weird wog shit,” as someone once shouted out at us.

I do this so my son knows that we are not Western. Our faith is as much about identity as it is about belief. We are Hellenes and Orthodox, tethered to something ancient, intangible, and unique.

After church, we head to someone’s house, family and friends, to break the fast. We will eat avgolemono soup – egg and lemon soup. Us with chicken; others, more traditional, will eat magiritsa – not keen on offal.

We will compete at breaking each other’s red-dyed eggs. We’ll drink wine, eat halva (the tahini sweet across the Middle East), koulouria (traditional Greek Easter shortbread), and tsoureki – a sweet bread with mahlab, like the Jewish challah.

On Easter Sunday, smoke from charcoal spits will climb from backyards across Melbourne as Greeks feast on Pascha. Interestingly, the Easter foods egg and lemon soup, sweet bread and more were brought into Greece by Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Spain in 1492. They made Thessaloniki the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the Balkans. Up to 90 percent were slaughtered in Nazi death camps once the Nazis invaded Greece.

Ritual without belief, identity without apology

Thankfully, now the slaughter of the lambs, also a Passover tradition, is distant in abattoirs. I was 13 when my uncle, Harry, brought home a lamb for Easter. All the cousins thought it was a great pet, and in the massive backyard of his Adelaide home, Lamby (as we called him) frolicked. One day in Holy Week, Lamby was no longer there. He had to “go back to the farm,” my uncle said. But we all knew Lamby was turning over charcoal on a spit for Easter.

Why does an atheist do this? Ethnicity? History? Tradition? Family? Yeah, in part. But more to tear the fabric of contemporary life for a time. It is an otherworldly experience – cantors sing Byzantine melismatic chants that blend with Eastern incense, and the murmurs of parishioners all meld in a church that has remained unchanged for 2000 years. Whether in Melbourne, Athens, a Peloponnesian village, Addis Ababa, or Constantinople/Istanbul, our Orthodox church remains a liminal space, time-out-of-time, and it links us all.