Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The smallest festival of the Greek summer may be the most personal one. In the yard of the Evangelismos tis Theotokou church in Park Extension, behind the tents and the folding tables, an 80-year-old Cretan stood over steaming cauldrons for two days, boiling goat and stirring wedding pilaf exactly as he learned in his village, while his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren served the plates. The festival of Agios Eftychios is organized by a single family, it runs on a promise to a saint, and every dollar it raises is given away.
The panigiri, held Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23 at 777 Saint-Roch Street, one week after the Dekapentavgousto, is the work of Eftychios Makrymanolakis, who traces his roots to the village of Prines in Selino, Chania. For more than a decade he has marked the feast of his patron saint with a menu found nowhere else on the Montreal festival circuit: vrasto, the boiled goat of Crete, the gamopilafo wedding pilaf simmered in its broth, and tsigariasto, alongside the familiar souvlakia and sausages, with music. “The goat needs three hours to boil, then straining, scalding, watching, measuring. It is a long process,” he said, in an interview with The Montreal Greek Times at the festival. “At the beginning it was difficult, but little by little people came to love it. They wait all year for this day to eat the pilafi.”
The festival began as an offering for the small church of Agios Eftychios near his village in Chania. Today the proceeds stay in Montreal. “We give the money here, for charitable causes, for the hospitals and above all for our schools,” Makrymanolakis said. “Hellenism needs this, so that we keep our language, our tradition, our faith and our genos from dissolving here in the melting pot of Canada.”
The family is the whole workforce, by design. Nine children, among them five daughters, work the tables and the grills, and a long line of grandchildren and great-grandchildren named Eftychis and Eftychia take their turn serving. “We do this every year for the grace of Agios Eftychios, and we want to say a warm thank you from our whole family to everyone who comes and supports us,” said his daughter Toula. Apostolis Makrymanolakis, the youngest son, framed the purpose a generation ahead: “We send the money to the church schools here, for the small children, so they do not forget the language, the history and the religion. They need to know where they come from.”
The weather gave with one hand and took with the other. Saturday was a fair festival day, and on Sunday heavy rain poured on Park Extension, a pattern Makrymanolakis lamented in a written account of the festival dated August 25, noting that storms have cost the effort a day in recent years. The ledger he published with it is the measure of the family’s work: $5,000 to the community’s Greek schools, $500 each to the churches of the Evangelismos, the Koimisis, Saint Anne and Holy Wisdom, $500 to Magic Mission, $500 to the Shriners hospital and $1,000 to a Greek student in need, a total of $9,000 given away.
He intends to keep the vow for as long as he stands at the cauldrons. “As long as I live I will do this. There is no way I will stop,” he said. “I believe God and Agios Eftychios are beside me.” The festival closed the parikia’s summer season, and the community calendar turned next to the Montreal Greek Film Festival in October.
