Eastertide | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 29, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 31.

Older Byzantine Type, formerly the Metropolitan or First Church of Greece.

Eastertide.

THE echoes of the noisy, spectacular celebration of Easter by the Greeks have not yet died away. The smoke of myriads of tapers is still smudging the inner walls of the seventy churches in Athens, and of the scores of chapels dedicated to various saints in the neighboring villages and country, while the scent of tallow and beeswax is still discernible in the hazy atmosphere of the public squares and leading thorofares. The chanting by the priests of the same liturgy that their predecessors have chanted for centuries gone by, and the responses of the psalterers and boy choruses—the only music ever heard by the worshiper—still resound within the ubiquitous temple of Byzantine architecture.

The blast of the buglers heralding the approach of the icon of Christ in the tomb as it is borne horizontally upon the shoulders of white-haired priests thru the streets; the tramp of the soldiery with their clanking arms as they accompany the bier of the dead Christ; the playing of funeral dirges with muffled drums and horns; the flickering candles of thousands of high and low pressing their way in one vast throng in the wake of the bier to pay their respects to the dead; crosses, crosses everywhere—on the standards borne aloft before the bier, on the priests' robes, on the national flags hung along the way, on the cap of every soldier, dangling from the necklaces of women and children, on every church and chapel passed by, and, conspicuous above all, those visionary crosses described upon the breast by the countless multitudes who fill the streets and balconies, as they bare their heads to do honor to the passing picture upon a piece of tapestry,—

Archbishop of Patras, a seaport on the Gulf of Corinth.