Celebrate March 25!
Posted on March 1, 2016 by bob in EdNote
In our family, March 25 was a holiday. Unlike Labor Day or Thanksgiving, we never got out of school to observe the day, we never read about it in our Weekly Readers, we never studied it in history class. Regardless, my brother, sister and I, like my cousins and closest friends, spent several months each year in preparation for Greek Independence Day.
As far as Greek holidays go, March 25 packs a powerful punch. It honors the beginning of the Greek Revolution in 1821 as well as the church observance of Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she would bear the Christ child. In Greece, March 25 is a national holiday. In New York City, it’s marked by parades down Fifth Avenue. In Montgomery, Alabama, we celebrated each year with the Greek School Independence Day program.
In the early 1960s the Greek community in Montgomery was about 60 families strong. Along with Sunday School, most of us children between the ages of 5-17 attended an afternoon language school three times a week. Though usually taught by the parish priest, not every man of the cloth was up to the task of instructing children who’d rather be out playing than reading the Greek equivalent of Dick, Jane and Sally, enduring tests that required correct spelling AND accent marks, and conjugating verbs whose endings never stayed the same.
Each January, our teacher — be it the priest or an erstwhile member of the community like Mrs. Heropoulos (just pronouncing her last name was a semester’s treatise for some) — developed the program for the Independence Day celebration. The evening almost always included a dinner prepared by community members, several of whom represented the finest eateries in town. In those pre-chain restaurant days many of Montgomery’s most well-known eating establishments — The Elite, the Riviera, the Seven Seas, The Sheridan Cafe, and The Embers, just to name a few — were Greek-owned.
After two months of rehearsals we were finally prepared. The younger children performed flowery poems onstage, paying homage to the birthplace of democracy, while the older ones participated in an overly dramatic (didn’t the Greeks invent the genre?) re-enactment of heroism displayed during the independence struggle. Key to the evening was the fact that we performed the program in our parents’ native tongue.
Never mind that most of us kids had never been to Greece, or that none of us had much of an inkling about the 140 year-old-event we glorified each March 25. It didn’t matter. We played to an appreciative audience of immigrant parents and grandparents who were thrilled with the Greek we’d mastered (or not) and touched by re-conjured memories of the homeland they’d left so many years ago.
The program concluded each year with a recitation of the Greek national anthem, to be followed, like clockwork, by The Star Spangled Banner. The anthems were always the finale, and always in the exact same order.
Our parents’ love and respect for their heritage never superseded their proud allegiance to the place they now called home. It was not a formal part of our Greek School instruction, but it was the lesson we all learned best.
Sandra Polizos, Editor
primeeditor@gmail.com
Happy March 25!
