Great Friday

By writing about Friday day at all, please note that I am burying the lede. Good Friday day is pretty normal, for tourists anyway. The religious folks are in or around church, as the churches are open and some have loudspeakers outside so you can hear what is going on inside. 

We spent the afternoon in Oia, which is at the northern tip of the island and thought to be an extraordinarily beautiful town. It is certainly very pretty and it's sited dramatically, on top of a cliff with house and hotels either clinging on the side or dug into the cliff. Lots of white and blue and occasional splashes of yellow, and the water far below. The streets, such as they might be called, are really narrow passages, slightly larger than alleys really, lined with shops ranging from the cheapest, junkiest souvenirs to expensive jewelry, clothing, and artwork. Between Oia and Fira, which we had visited yesterday, I don't think I've ever seen such a high concentration of jewelry stores.

The weather has been beautiful and after walking around for a while, we had a sorbet on what might be called a boardwalk if was either made of boards or not 300 feet above the water. It was a lovely place to spend an afternoon. We went back to the hotel and rested for a while, went out to dinner at 7:00 and then walked over and up to Pyrgos for the evening activities.

I do not know how to properly describe what we did Friday night so I'll lay out the bare facts and let the videos do most of the talking. It was Good Friday, and the Greek Orthodox Easter week is like nothing in the churches most of us heathens are familiar with. It's why we're on this island, staying in this town at this point in time. On Good Friday, there are day-long masses, and then there is a parade of an effigy of JC on a cross around the village (there is nothing on Santorini that would be called a city) and then it varies, but there are always fireworks and in Pyrgos, they take it one step further. 

When we went to dinner, just a few minutes up the road, we saw a steady stream of people heading up the road to the town. We questioned why we were walking in the opposite direction from everyone else. They were all walking because the road to Pyrgos had been closed since 5 and there was a Field of Dreams-like line of cars on the main road heading up the hill. Honestly, I have no idea where they all parked. Our hotel closed off its parking lot so nobody could go there, and the town is very much at the top of a big, steep hill- I walked all around and on every road around there was no place to go except straight down a steep incline with no obvious place to put a car. We were staying a five minute walk to town and didn’t have to worry about it. 

So why is this happening? (oops, lapsed into guide-speak for a moment). Well, all week long, people, including our hotel manager, place cans filled with some kind of mix of sawdust and wax along the tops of buildings, on walls and really on any outdoor horizontal surface. And at 9:00, I don't know how many people began running around lighting them. Not with matches- with propane torches. Pyrgos is one of those fortress villages with lots of winding alleyways and staircases and no real center. It would be be next to impossible to tell someone to meet you inside the walls. It was startling to see people running through narrow passages at full speed though crowds of people with torches blazing. 

Within 15 minutes or so, all of the cans have been lit. It’s a famous thing; the town seems ablaze and it is a truly spectacular sight. We got up in the middle of it and wandered around looking for new views and good photos. It wasn’t difficult. Because the town is so vertical there was always something else you could look down on or across to. Flames everywhere. It was spectacular and beautiful and terrifying.

To add to the amusement, there was a 30 mile per hour wind blowing, which was sending showers of sparks flying from the cans that were exposed to the wind, which was most of them. It was hot and there were places that I was not willing to go because it looked like too much. I’ll let the videos take it from here (still photos don't really capture it).

We’ve been to Running of the Bulls and the massive street parties before and after, and this was in every way at least as exciting and unique. Unforgettable.

Adding to the amusement, after about an hour and a half, most of the fuel in the cans had burned off, making the cans light enough to be blown about by the gale force winds. Once the burning cans started flying off the walls we decided to leave, which was no easy feat because of the crowds and the chaotic nature of the alleyways. You just take a passage that’s going down and figure you’ll eventually see something familiar. This took such a long time that I was starting to get concerned, even though I knew it was impossible to get lost. We walked and walked and eventually I said “I think we’re at our hotel!” And sure enough, there was the hotel entrance- we’d come down the opposite way than how we'd gone up. But it worked. Here's what it looked like from around the hotel.

We did not stay up long when we got back to the room. We looked at photos and videos and then went to bed.