From phyllo to filotimo; a taste of being Greek
Aside from food, religion, philosophy, government, familial love, education, and a few million other things, the Greeks have offered the world very little.
Aside from food, religion, philosophy, government, familial love, education, and a few million other things, the Greeks have offered the world very little.
That's the slyly delivered take on his culture offered by George Horiates, an organizer of the annual Greek Agora Festival in Cherry Hill.
A personal-injury attorney in Pennsauken, Horiates, 46, sat in a blue-and-white tent outside St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church on Sunday, trying to explain Greek-ness to an outsider.
"This culture at its base involves food," said Horiates, who lives in Moorestown. "It's an integral part of our socialization."
But life is more than souvlaki and loukoumades (honey puffs), Horiates added.
To understand the Greeks, the word you're looking for is filotimo, he said, explaining it has to do with pride, dignity, and courage. "It's also a notion of love for fellow man, and caring, and being open to all," he said. "It's the core of being Greek."
That core was very much on display at the festival, believed to be the 40th or 41st (there's a confusion regarding origins) held to benefit the church, which boasts 1,000 families as congregants. Some 20,000 visitors attended the festival this year, Horiates said. It ran Thursday to Sunday.
Along with food and drink, there was artwork. Selling her photographs of Greece at the festival, Elizabeth Holden, 33, of Merchantville, admitted up front she has no Greek blood.
But, she said quickly, "They have taken me in."
Church members make friends of strangers in no time, Holden said, and she marvels at how people maintain the old ways of the Greek culture while "still opening their arms to others."
There's no mystery to such behavior, said Bill Balis, 49, of Mullica Hill, who owns Adelphia Restaurant in Deptford. He contributed some of the festival's food as homage to his parents, who helped start the festival.
"We Greeks have a heart of gold," he said, making it sound neither immodest nor implausible. "It's what we're about."
Credited with creating democracy and various schools of intellectual thought, the Greeks are also noted for providing the world with words to live by. Among wares for sale at the festival were banners embroidered with aphorisms attributed to famous Greeks:
"Necessity is the mother of invention," believed to be first said by Plato.
"Birds of a feather flock together," wisdom said to be gleaned from Aristotle.
"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched," Aesop is said to have intoned.
If you understand anything about the Greeks, said registered nurse Paula Konstantinides, 49, of Voorhees, know this: "We know how to live life," she said. "It's about establishing balance: work, culture, family, religion.
"Once you do that, life is easy."
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