Breaking the Fast on Easter Sunday
Breaking the Fast on Easter Sunday
Easter Breakfast in Athens
When I wake up the house is still, bodies turning in sleep on couches and mattresses, working hard to digest a feast that kicked off at 1 am and finished at 4. Greek Orthodox Easter is serious eating, and financial crisis or not, by midday there’s going to be a million lambs roasting on spits and in ovens across the country, their insides served up in elaborate braids of sweetmeats and intestines alongside the crisped up ribs and shanks.
But midday is a long way away, and I am the only one awake, so I get to be alone for the last enduring ritual of my lapsed faith: the first slice of tsureki. To you it probably doesn’t look too special: pleated bread with a dyed hardboiled egg wedged in the middle, ridges shiny with egg-white glaze. But I look forward to this first Easter Sunday slice all year, and that’s why I queued 25 minutes for this loaf in a hole-in-the-wall bakery in downtown Athens, taking my turn behind old ladies with curls fresh from the hairdresser and grandchildren fresh from the toy store. Because when making tsureki, being a click off in terms of humidity, yeast, temperature, altitude or mood will deliver a dense brick of chewy despair, so each and every successful specimen feels like a blessing, a reward for a leap of faith, a cry of ‘it has risen!’. Because tsureki is springier than challah, and more aromatic than brioche, with tangy Levantine notes of mastic, mahlep and orange water, and long fibers that split into airy strands as the twists and turns of the braid are torn off (always by hand) and separated, like hair released from a tight updo with great relief at the end of the day.
Because when I was a kid and there was half-hearted Holy Week fasting in our household, that first taste felt like a technicolor explosion of eggs and butter and delicious sin. Because Easter is a lush spell of spring in a country that sees precious little of it before it jumps into summer, and because everyone in this house is sleeping soundly, knowing they are with friends, and are loved. Because the morning light through the window is just so, and because even heathens deserve communion once in a while. It’s maybe not the body of Christ, but it’s the body of ritual, of memories and belonging, and this first bite is the sweetest.