A Wedding in Nymphaio

Saturday, June 27, 2009

On our last full day in Greece, Chrysostomos and Roula drove us all to the wedding of Eirini, daughter of our mutual friends Tassos and Christina. It was held in Nymphaio (say “Nim-FAY-oh”), a medieval village in northern Greece, cradled among the highest mountain peaks up along the border with the former Yugoslavia. It overlooks five lakes.



View Nymphaio and Edessa in a larger map

Nymphaio is about a three or four hour drive from Thessaloniki. We left around 10:30 in the morning and came the scenic route, past fields and vineyards and especially orchards, peach and nectarine and apricot and cherry orchards. We stopped at a roadside fruit stand and bought cherries and the very best apricots I’ve ever eaten, squishy soft, very juicy, very sweet. Now I know how apricots are supposed to taste!

It’s the area where Alexander lived. I mean the Alexander, of course, the Great. Several of the towns and villages along the way are named for his generals. Pella, his actual city, was also along our route.

We passed through Edessa (“ED-es-sah”), a mountain village famous for its waterfalls, greenery, rivers and rivulets, and panoramic views.

Nymphaio was founded in the year 1385. In 1942, it was torched by the Germans, and since then has had modern utilities added, but it still looks the same as it did in 1385. The houses are of stone rather than stucco, and they don’t have the usual flat, red-tiled roofs. Instead, on account of the snow, the roofs are steeply gabled, and they are tin. They all have white Battenburg lace curtains at wood-framed casement windows and fancy wrought iron bars outside the windows and sometimes the doors. Inside, the traditional colors for household linens (rugs, upholstery, tablecloths) are red, white, and black. The streets of the village are paved with the same kind of stones used in the houses, and of course they are narrow and winding and sometimes steep. Here is a photo of the school, now a museum. (There are no more permanent residents in Nymphaio; only summer people live there, so there's no need of a school now.)



Chrysostomos wanted to find a particular house, where friends of his were waiting for us to come and freshen up beforehand. It was too late to do that, but we stopped anyway, where we saw some other people dressed in wedding clothes, to ask the way.

And that’s where Demetrios met – can you guess?—another Old Friend! It was a man named Kostas, whom he had known in medical school.

Okay, so the father of the bride is a cardiologist who was in med school with Demetrios. So it stands to reason many of the people he’d invite would also be doctors, yes? Yes. So Demetrios and Kostas had a joyful, if short, reunion.

We heard music up the street some and followed the sound, to find a band consisting of a trumpet, a saxophone, a clarinet, and a bass drum. “They’re bringing the bride!” I exclaimed. That’s how it’s done in Greek villages: everybody gathers at the groom’s house, and then, accompanied by music and sometimes dancing, the party makes its way to the bride’s house. They pick her up there and escort her to the church to be married.

The whole village seemed to have been invited to this event; the streets were thronged as our procession moved toward the church.

The new bishop of the area (Florina) presided, the successor to the widely-loved Bishop Augustine Kandiotis. Bishop Augustine is still alive, but has profound dementia nowadays. The new bishop was his choice to succeed him.

Fr. Gervasios was also there, who has a famous prison ministry. He raises money to pay the debts of people who are in debtors’ prison, and has already released tens of thousands of them.

It was the first time we had seen the mother of the bride, Christina, since she lost her hearing. At that time, she was too depressed to see anyone. Today, of course, she was radiantly happy, and she has learned to lip-read very well.

The reception was huge; there were 50 tables, each seating ten, under tents on the lawn of the main hotel in town. The buffet was lavish and beautiful. We sat with or near several friends, including Andreas the poet and his wife Thomai; also Vasilios and Maria. Also sharing our table was Harry Truman! Or at least his double. Not only his features, but also his facial expressions were eerily like Truman’s. When we asked him, he said yes, the resemblance had provoked much comment.

I danced once before we had to leave, to the tune played at virtually every Greek wedding, “Beautiful is Our Bride.” We were to leave Greece the next day, so wanted to get home early, and Chrysostomos wanted to have coffee in Edessa on our way back. We got there just as the twilight was beginning, found the waterfalls, and a taverna situated between two of them. Two rushing rivers, each making an impressive roar, and then falling away down the mountain, on either side of us.

Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a picture of the terrace below where we sat, where we went to have a closer view of the falls.




As usual, after a while the men fell into a discussion of Greek and world politics, so Roula invited me to have a walk with her. There was a tiny church nearby she wanted to show me, hardly more than a shrine. So we walked across part of a park to it and she explained the icons, depicting local saints.

There was something going on a little further along the walkway; there was a lot of children’s laughter, and there was a big, white sheet set up. “Karagiozes,” said Maria. My heart skipped a beat as I recognized that name. He is the main character in Greek shadow theater. There are set characters in traditional Greek shadow puppet theater; find photos of them here. There are also several set tales; this one was a farce falled "Karagiozis the Doctor".



Demetrios had told me about Greek shadow theater for years and years, and has fond memories of performing it in some neighbor’s yard, behind a borrowed sheet, the characters lovingly cut out of paper glued onto sticks. He had to see this! I ran, yes ran, to the table where he and Chrysostomos were sitting and told them to come quickly for a wonderful surprise.

We couldn’t stay to watch very much of it because we had to hurry home, but Demetrios was delighted I finally got to see what he has been describing almost ever since I met him. So was I. It seemed the perfect “nightcap” after a perfect day.

Long life to the bride and groom, Eirini and Vasilis!