The change has me seeing deeper links not only between Orthodox practices with other religions of our day but to ancient religions in the same way today’s Olympic rings interlink with original Greek games held three or four centuries before Jesus was born.
My epiphany began when longtime Springfield acquaintance Anna Plataniotis took a seat in Mundy’s restaurant, where I was breakfasting and watching the game that gold medal morning.
Anna reminded me she grew up as a fan of Toronto’s Maple Leafs, the team I most often watched on Hockey Night in Canada from a Windsor station before an upstart Detroit station brought us the Red Wings, whose home stadium (not far from Detroit’s Greek Town) was called The Olympia.
She had just come from the Assumption Church of the Blessed Virgin (Greek) Orthodox Church, where she’d dropped off a koliva. The object that sounded to go me to Greek-made car recently tagged with a tariff turned out to be a stunningly beautiful dish and the centerpiece of a memorial celebration held later that day – as it has been for centuries -- to honor a parishioner of the Greek church who had passed a year before.
Anna, whose baclava could pass as ambrosia (the food of the gods) felt like she was treading on holy ground 33 years ago when she made her first koliva for a service held 40 days after her mother-in-law’s passing. (Kolivas also are made for services held six months after a passing or on the anniversary date of the death for up to seven years.)
For guidance, Anna had called on Thora Mae Ioanidis,“for sure in her 80s,” Anna said “one of the most lovely” of the many lovely ladies of the church who readily shared their old country cooking and baking secrets with her.
“I was so nervous that I kept calling,” Anna said -- “a dozen times” alone on the first of two days required to make it.
Her anxiety eased only after Ionidis calmly told her: “Anna, it’s going to be OK. We’re so happy you’re making it. Your mother-in-law would be so proud.”
She’s since made three or four a year – including for her father-in-law, mother, father and Dr. James Gianakoupoulous, the father of her dear friend Antigone Petroff.
Because of such intimate connections – and a blessing added during the memorial service – the koliva tends to nestle in people’s hearts next to those they’ve loved and lost.
A few inches thick and the diameter of a dorm room basketball hoop, Anna’s kolivas are covered with powdered sugar patiently tamped down under a layer of wax paper. On top she uses White Jordan Almonds (the name invokes the Holy Land) to sculpt a cross in the center, a smaller one along the top, and the initials – written in Greek letters -- of the dearly departed.
The result has is a surface of piece of marble that covers a moist cake below.
The base ingredient is wheat, a grain with properties the church’s Father Dumitru Rusu says reflects in the natural world the pattern of eternal life through Jesus’ crucifixion.
“In Orthodox spirituality,” he said, “if the grain does not die, it does not multiply. Koliva is made from hundreds of grains (of wheat), so this is how the multitude becomes one and it’s the unity of the faithful.”
In the relevant Biblical passage (John 12:24), Jesus foreshadows his crucifixion with a reference to wheat: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Into the wheat Anna stirs a nut-and-raisin mixture seasoned with cinnamon and raisins and walnuts. For families with nut allergies, “I use pumpkin seeds and other crunchy items.”
She also adds pomegranates in the bottom and says her signature act is soaking her raisins in anise, a licorice-flavored spice that mimics ouzo, Greece’s signature liquor.
Breadcrumbs are sprinkled on top of the mix to symbolize the loose soil over a grave, and the crowning layer of powdered sugar, says Anna, reflects “the sweetness of paradise and hope that (the departed) rest in peace. (Honey stirred into the nut mixture further sweetens the pot as well.)
Himself Romanian, Father Rusu says adaptive differences appear across the ethnicity range of Orthodox believers in the way “every family has its own recipe.”
“The Greeks drain the grain and let it dry overnight, while the Russians and other nations” prefer their grain remain moist” to the point “it’s almost like soup.”
In the old times, he added, “when the memorial service was taking place, next to the koliva was sitting a bottle of wine, sweet wine, usually red.”
Orthodox leaders don’t shy away from what history indicates: that the tradition of the koliva in religious ceremonies predates Christianity.
Says a December 2024 article in The Orthodox News: “During the pagan festival of the Anthesteria, ancient Greeks used to distribute a mixture of cooked seeds and nuts in honor of their dead,” which Christianity honors on All Saints Day.
“In the early years of the new religion, it adds, coins, among other things, were distributed as alms. In the process, Ancient Greek and Orthodox Christian traditions helped to shape the custom as we know it today.”
Anthesteria was set, like Easter is, in spring, the season of rebirth, and celebrated the Greek nature god Dionysus as Easter celebrates the Christ.
The Britannica entry on the festival mentions activities of one of the three days of Anthesteria that have obvious connections to Halloween, its Mexican cousin, The Day of the Dead, and the Jewish Passover.
“On these days, it was believed, the souls of the dead came up from the underworld and walked abroad; people chewed leaves of whitethorn and smeared their doors with tar to protect themselves from evil,” much as the Jews of the Bible painted blood around their doors to protect them from an Egyptian plague.
And there is more common ground.
Koliva also is served on the Orthodox Saturday of the Souls,” which was Feb. 14 this year and is also called Parental Saturday, emphasizing the importance of parents and godparents in the religious education of children as many churches do on Mother’s and Father’s Days as well as All Saints Day.
Rusu spoke to the tradition of reverence for parents such celebrations promote and that koliva represents in a way that evokes the fifth commandment to honor our mothers and fathers.
“How (does) the memory of someone become eternal? Because they raised their kids the right way and (the kids) remember the right way (to) properly remember their parents and properly remember their grandparents.”
“And this connects us with God,” he adds, “because they are not just random beings. They are the parents and the grandparents who were granted us from God.”
For Anna, all of that is baked into the koliva.
“For me and for my cousins -- and all the other folks I’ve made (a koliva for) for, it’s a chance to memorialize our family members. And so, we go to church and we pray for their souls and say, “Eternal be their memory.”
That they speak those words in a language that may seem Greek, we all have our mother tongues that in a spirit that wholly the same.
Tom Stafford is a columnist for the Springfield News-Sun.