The Greek Festival

After reading The Iliad and then, quickly reading through The Odyssey this week, it seemed all too fitting to go to the Greek Festival taking place in Santa Cruz today. I always enjoy these festivals, but it does strike me as kind of strange that the festival by and large is a food festival with some Greek music playing in the eating area.  What about all of our rich cultural heritage?  I think there should be public storytelling of The Odyssey or something like in addition to the food, music, and dance.  I do, however, see the value in food as a celebration of ethnicity because of it's ability to cross all sorts of barriers since everyone has to eat!

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the focus on the food at all.  Especially since you will never probably find me rolling grape leaves meticulously to make dolmades regardless of how much I enjoy eating them and the same goes with basically anything requiring phyllo dough, so I appreciate always having a good festival to get dolmades, spanikopita, and baklava at the least.  I imagine the reason for this is that these festivals are put on by Greek Orthodox Church communities and thus, they don't want to secularize it too much.  Plus, Greek food is something that all Greek families can contribute to a fundraising festival whereas other goods that could be sold or displayed require more specific expertise.  I don't know, but I do think that adding some of the rich storytelling history and maybe some fund language lessons or something would be fun.

I've also been have my own personal little Greek Festival of reading over the past week.  I actually quite enjoyed it.  I mean, The Iliad was not too entertaining for me.  It was all about war, battles, weird male warrior pageantry, and trickery.  The Odyssey, on the other hand, was so good that I couldn't put it down!  I think when I've tried to read it before I was just too lost because I hadn't read The Iliad and was getting mired in the details of the stories being told about people who were integral to the action of The Iliad but had no place in the action of The Odyssey.  The other thing I liked is that this is the story of an underdog, as opposed to the story of an aggressor (i.e. The Iliad).  I'm always a sucker for the underdog; I just can't help it.  So, when the story begins with Athena empowering Telemachus, Odysseus' son who doesn't have a father figure in his life, to take a journey to find out what has happened to his father while also coaching him into "becoming a man", it is quite touching and also an interesting coming of age story.  Odysseus' journey is also pretty darn interesting.  He is held as the goddess Calypso's sex slave for something like 8 years, and she wants to make him into a god, but he doesn't want all that.  He just wants to go home to Penelope and his son, which is a much different male/female interaction than you seen in The Iliad.

The other thing I really liked about The Odyssey is that we learn about the things that have happened during the last 8 years between the end of The Iliad and the present.  I like that kind of storytelling because it isn't just random, people are talking to one another and trying to get information and stories are told.  For example, I found it far more interesting to learn about Agamemnon's horrible fate from Menelaus than I would have if it was told as its own stand alone story of violence and treachery.  I guess that's just my preference.

Anyway, as cheesy as it may sound, I feel like I've connected with my ancestry in some ways this week.  I don't often find ways to connect with my heritage since I don't speak Greek or participate in any Greek communities.  The one way that I do stay connected to my ancestry is through my great-grandfather's and grandmother's recipes, and eating at the festivals is always home-cooked food that taste just like what we used to eat at yia yia's.