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Annual 3-Day Greek Festival September 5, 6, 7 2008
September 5, 6, 7 2007
Rain or Shine Under Tents º Free Admission
Friday 5pm - 10pm / Saturday 12pm - 10pm / Sunday 12pm - 9pm
Raffle - 1st Prize $1,000 cash, 2nd Prize $500 cash, 3rd Prize $500 cash
Preparing for the Festival
by Lindsay Ryan, Brown University 2003
Harry Bablenis, 72, scurries around the kitchen in a tall paper chef's hat dumping lemon juice on this, sauce on that, and seasoning on everything. The chicken is under control, cooking away in rows of convection ovens. Aluminum trays of buttery rice pilaf are stacked on shelves above the burners. Potatoes are baking golden brown and salty in several ovens, but Bablenis sticks in a few more trays just to be safe. Then he hurries over to instruct the man at the automatic tomato slicer and gives the countertop a few quick mops with a rag more for emphasis than cleanliness.
Bablenis may officially be retired. But for one September weekend each year, he is a lead chef in charge of approximately 10 middle-aged men, 40 large sacks of potatoes, and 2400 lbs. of lamb. And that is no small feat.
It is the weekend before the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, and the Greek Festival at the Church of the Annunciation is in full swing. Chartered in 1905, the Church of the Annunciation was the first Greek Orthodox parish established in Rhode Island and only the third in New England. It moved to its current location on Oaklawn Avenue in Cranston in 1968 from a building on Pine Street in Providence. The church is a striking neo-Byzantine building: a huge stone dome set atop blue and white tiled walls inset with yellow disc-like windows. Icons of Jesus, the disciples, and scenes from feast days decorate the arches and dome of the interior, and a wrought metal screen with mosaic panels separates the altar from the nave.
The congregation includes around 650 families, according to Father Andrew George, the pastor. Although most parishioners are from Cranston, Warwick, and Johnston, members come from 31 cities and towns across Rhode Island.
Held September 8th, the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin commemorates the birth of Mary, mother of Jesus. The Church of the Annunciation began celebrating the holiday between 30 and 40 years ago with an annual church picnic. But the picnic grew each year as parishioners brought their non-Greek friends, and the church started a public festival nearly 20 years ago. The Greek Festival now draws an estimated 10,000 people annually and runs from a Friday evening through Sunday. Last year's Greek Festival netted approximately $75,000, most of which went towards an ongoing $500,000 capital campaign to repair the 36-year-old church building.
On Saturday, people amble through the tents that surround the church eating baklava and listening to caliope-like Greek music over loudspeakers. Unbeknownst to them, trays of homemade baklava and spanokopita made for the festival by some of the women of the church fill two cooled rooms and much of another in the church building.
During the festival, parishioners sell not only food but also items such as Byzantine prayer chant compilations, children's books in Greek, and Greek vocabulary flashcards. "One dollar, one dollar, start off your purchases with this!" shouts a kid hawking Greek flag fake tattoos. Meanwhile, two women mull over one t-shirt that reads "My First Greek T-Shirt" and another that says "Little Greek God." In the same booth as the t-shirts, bumperstickers bear the phrase, "American by Birth, Greek by the Grace of God."
Twice during the afternoon, crowds gather around the perimeter of the church parking lot to see the performance of the church's Odyssey Dance Troupe. The dance troupe has almost 90 members altogether and is split into elementary, junior, and senior divisions by age. Most of the dancers are already second or third generation, according to Father George, proof that Greek dancing is not dying out.
During the first performance, the senior troupe strides onto the parking lot dressed in traditional Greek costumes painstakingly handsewn by parishioner Zoe Mitrelis, who emigrated from Greece in 1966. The women wear red gowns, embroidered long black vests, black aprons, and black headscarves. The men wear black vests fastened with gold chains, white shirts with wide sleeves, khaki trousers that balloon at the thighs, and swaths of cloths around their waists. Black caps perch on their heads and pompoms adorn their ankles.
The music that pipes up over the speakers ranges from haunting minor strains to upbeat melodies that sound like carousel tunes. The first dance begins as a slow and stately march, which quickens into intricate footwork, hops, and spins. The dancers blend into a single moving and bouncing chain of maroon and white, rotating and bobbing perfectly in sync.
The dances represent all different regions of Greece; some are line dances, some circle dances, some represent courtship, some war. Greek dancing was illegal when Greece was under Ottoman Turk occupation, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until independence in 1831. However, traditional dances were passed along secretly and survived.
After the younger divisions perform, the senior dance troupe returns for two final dances. During the last one, a more modern number, the sound system electricity goes out and the troupe keeps dancing in silence. It picks up again half a minute later, and the dancers are still precisely on beat. The audience breaks into spontaneous applause.
But back in the kitchen, Harry Bablenis sees none of this. A native of the Greek island of Skiathos, he was an officer on a cargo ship that stopped in Rhode Island on one of its voyages. After meeting his wife during that time at port, Bablenis immigrated to the U.S. in 1968. He joined the Church of the Annunciation that year and began cooking for the annual picnics that evolved into the Greek Festival. Meanwhile, he worked for one year as a chef at the Biltmore Hotel and for 10 years as a chef at the Hilton Hotel, both in Providence. Although the food he cooked for the hotels was strictly American, not Greek, he could still hone his self-taught cooking skills. Following his years as a chef, he set up his own wholesale poultry business, from which he is now retired.
The core crew of cooks for the festival is the same nearly every year. Besides Bablenis, there is John Mitrelis, a schoolteacher whose parents emigrated from Greece. There is Nick Apostolou, also first generation, who used to own a drive-up steak and fast food restaurant. And there is Mike Papigiotis, who emigrated from northern Greece when he was 14 and is now retired from working for a convenience store chain.
"All Greeks have a restaurant at one time or another," says Papigiotis, who never did own a restaurant himself. "They all like to cook. And if we don't own a restaurant we still like to cook... We learn from our grandmothers, who put a handful of spices in everything," he says. The cooks begin planning the food for the festival in May, meeting monthly to discuss logistics and any changes that need to be made from the previous year. The food must be ordered from wholesalers in advance. The cooking equipment and the eight convection ovens are owned by the church; some of the equipment was bought used and some donated.
Food preparations this year began the Tuesday before the event with the cubing and marinating of pork for souvlaki. Wednesday was devoted to skewering the cubed pork and putting the skewers into refrigerator boxes. The resulting shishkebobs numbered several thousand. Thursday went to slicing tomatoes and cucumbers for Friday's gyros and to readying equipment, from the feta grinding machine and the lamb slicer to stewpots and large rectangular baking pans. Friday through Sunday are nonstop cooking. During the three days of the festival, most of the core cooks arrive each morning at 5:30 A.M. and usually don't leave until 11 P.M.
"These men didn't go to culinary school, but they're master chefs. They grew up in it," says Peter Reinhart, 53, a parishioner and baking professor at Johnson and Wales University. Reinhart is cooking rice the way Bablenis taught him. Bablenis' recipes don't use tablespoons and cups as measures; they use pitchers. The proportions for the rice are a block of butter and a block of margarine to one pitcher of rice to two pitchers of water. The butter and margarine go in first, then the rice, and finally the water, so the rice is evenly coated in butter when the water is added. One of Bablenis' many cooking tricks.
"Harry teaches us all," says Reinhart. "It's not anything that's a recipe but just his use of lemon and spices, his feel for it."
The Greeks consider the meal part of their heritage and culture, adds Reinhart, who converted to Christianity in his early twenties and then to the Greek Orthodox Church 15 years later. The dinner table is about much more than food; it is a place where traditions can be passed down from generation to generation, Reinhart explains.
A large metal table is heaped with at least 50 sides of raw lamb, all of which will be gone by the following evening. Lamb cooks in the convection ovens alongside the chicken and potatoes; the air in the kitchen is warm and redolent. Giant stewpots on the stove contain beef broth and juice from cooking the lamb. This mixture is ladled over the lamb to keep it moist as it cooks for two and a half hours. Men from the parish operate the giant automatic blades that spit out thin slices of lamb once it's cooked. Other volunteers put tin foil over full trays of lamb and stack them on shelves. But one step is reserved for Bablenis: the decision as to when the lamb is done. This, explains Reinhart, is a true sign of kitchen authority.
Teenagers hurry in and out of the kitchen with rolling carts, supplying the Saturday afternoon customers. "More chicken, more chicken!" they shout, or "Harry, I need a lamb." Bablenis directs the operation like an air traffic controller. He flips between Greek and English as the moment demands, Greek for most of the adults and English for the teenagers.
"Harry, you working hard?" asks a parishioner who has come into the kitchen with her daughter.
"No," he replies with only the faintest trace of a smile. "Of course not."
And in fact, Bablenis does look composed amidst the controlled chaos; he is unmistakably in his element. A little sweat trickles from his forehead to his mustache, but that can be chalked up to the heat of an entire wall of convection ovens and burners.
After all, the rush hasn't even started yet. Come 5 or 6 P.M., the lines of hungry customers wind all the way from the booths in back of the church to the street. And suddenly 40 large sacks of potatoes and 2400 lbs. of lamb don't seem like so much anymore.
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