The President of the Greek Community of Melbourne, Bill Papastergiadis, was hosted on SKAI TV’s breakfast program this week and spoke about how the Greeks of Australia will celebrate Orthodox Easter.
Mr Papastergiadis stressed that Greek Australians follow all Easter traditions, and mentioned The Greek Herald‘s special 80-page print edition for Orthodox Easter published on Saturday, April 27.
“The Greeks of Australia celebrate Easter massively and with splendour. Imagine that there are about 50 Greek Orthodox churches in Melbourne and tens of thousands attend the service in the churches. The first church was built by the Greek Community of Melbourne in 1900…” Mr Papastergiadis said at first.
Mr Papastergiadis then referred to The Greek Herald‘s Easter edition to commemorate Orthodox Easter: “Let me show you the cover of The Greek Herald that came out. A local Greek newspaper that had prepared 80 pages for the celebration of Easter. Hellenism in this country normally celebrates Easter just like in Greece.“
Asked about the Melbourne community and the celebrations in the churches, Mr Papastergiadis replied, “It should be pointed out that on Good Friday at the Epitaph procession we close all the streets around the church, the bells ring, but unfortunately, we don’t have the fireworks and rockets that you have in Greece. There have been 2-3 people injured before and they take more notice of this. The food is similar, however, as well as the tsourekia we have; the red eggs, we skewer lambs and cockerels, we have it all here. Imagine that in my law firm where most of my clients are Australian, I send them a tsoureki on Good Friday. I do that for about 100 clients, so that they also understand that there is multiculturalism in Australia and the customs and traditions continue. At the Resurrection last year we had our Prime Minister attend, he came down with us too.”
Mr Papastergiadis was also asked about participation through postal voting for the June 9 European elections:
“As for the postal vote, not too many people have registered. It is a few thousand, because for many years, unfortunately, the country had ignored the diaspora and there was no interest in participating. I believe that with time and in the next election the participation will increase, but at the moment we are not talking about too many,” he said.
