Pure Monday – Defter Kafara in Greece

The first day of the Great Lent for the Greeks is a national holiday. Now, instead of the usual one “Kali measure”they will welcome each other with words “Kali Sarality” – That is, the “good great post”!

“Pure Monday” (“Kafara Defter”) is a holiday (however not an official weekend). Many try to confess that day, and communion with the triumph of Orthodoxy.

In some areas of Greece, it is customary to get up to sunrise, swim or wash. In rural areas, this day is traditionally devoted to thorough cleaning. The hostesses to shine are branded metal dishes to clean it of absorbed fat.

Citizens celebrate Pure Monday picnic in nature and launch an air snake. The diet usually includes olives, greens, halva and a lean cake called Lagan.

“In Greece, the first day of the Great Lent, the so -called pure Monday, is the first holiday in the year, which is celebrated in the open air. People go to the countryside with whole families, rise to the hills and from there they launch air snakes.

Here is a good image of the beginning of a great post to compare it with the rites of the Western ash. Obviously, they are very different in their accents.

Ashes sprinkled onto the heads and leaving a mark on our faces, with all its symbolism of the repentance and inevitability of death, of course, reflects the important and inseparable component of the significance of the post as a whole. But Greek Orthodoxy, noting entering the post, focuses not on that. Against, We try to tie a post with fresh air, with the wind believing on top of the hills, with the arrival of spring.

Great post – This is the time of air snakes, the time of adventure, discoveries, new initiatives, new hopes. In this regard, of course, it is not an accident that the time of the Great Lent does not come in the fall, when the leaves fall, and the days become shorter, and not in the middle of the winter, when the trees stand naked, and the reservoirs freeze, but in the spring, when the ice is opened, and a new life declares itself about itself.

Indeed, the initial meaning of the English word “Lent“(Post) – this is precisely”springtime“, As can be seen from the words of the medieval poem: Lenten is come with love to towne, with Blosmen and with Briddes Rowne^{1 (}“Spring with love in the world entered, with bloom of the kidneys, with bird stumps“). It may seem strange to consider the post as a time to fall in love, but perhaps this is one of its meanings. The connection between fasting and spring is also visible in Orthodox liturgical texts: Lying is leaning, the color of repentance. Repentance – Metanoia “Changing the mind” – this is not ashes, but an opening flower.

This is the context in which we should talk about the great post: it is associated with the flight of paper snakes and with the beginning of spring.

But it is also associated with freedom. It is very significant that during the Great Lent, one of the main holidays of the church year, the Annunciation, celebrated on March 25, almost always accounts. On this day, we recall the freedom of the choice that the blessed Virgin Mary made. When the Archangel Gabriel announced Mary of God's plan, he expected from her an answer: “Ce, a slave of the Lord, may I be in your word”(Luke 1: 38).

This answer from Maria was not predetermined in advance, she could refuse. The Blessed Trinity respects human freedom. The message to the diogenet (2nd century according to R.Kh.) says: “God does not force, but convinces, for violence is alien to Him”². That's how it was with Virgin Mary: God would not have become a man, without first asking the voluntary consent of the one who was to become his mother. This was a prerequisite. “We are co -workers (Synergoi) with God,” says the apostle Pavel (1 Cor 3: 9), and first of all this applies to the Virgin Mary.

In the Annunciation, she became Synergos, a co -worker to God– not just an obedient tool in his hands, but an active participant in the sacrament (secrets). As Saint Irenaeus Lyon says († c. 200): “Maria contributed to householding“³. Here, in this way, another key to understanding the meaning of the post. Being a time of comprehension and renewal, the time of spiritual spring, the post is also associated with how we use our human freedom of choice.

Great Lent is the time when we learn to be free. For freedom, on the one hand, is something direct, but on the other hand, and what you need to learn.

If you asked me: “Are you playing the violin? “ And I would answer: “I'm not sure, I have never tried… ”, my answer would seem somewhat strange to you. Because I am not at all free to play Bach's sonata on the violin, if at first, through long and persistent classes, I do not master the tool. At the moral level, the situation is the same with the manifestation of our freedom. Being a person created in the image and likeness of God, I do not have true freedom, until I learn to use the freedom given to me correctly, and such learning implies obedience, discipline and self -denial.

Freedom is not just a gift, it is also a task. Russian spirituality calls this an ascetic feat. As Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) rightly noted: “Freedom is not easy, as her enemies think, slandering her, freedom is difficult, she is a heavy burden”⁴. But it is also a privilege and joy. Thus, the three “stands of the depths” that will help our ship in swimming through a high -hearted archipelago. ”

Metropolitan Callist (War) Great Lent and Consumption Society ⁵

1 Celia and Kenneth Sisam (Eds.), The Oxford Book of Medieval English Versford, 1970, p. 120.

2 Message to Diognet, VII, 4.

3 Against heresies, III, XXI, 7 (PG 7.953b).

4 Self -knowledge. The experience of philosophical autobiography, Moscow, “Dam”, 1990, p. 51 (chap. II, freedom).

5 Church Bulletin No. 5 (306) 2005

Source of Agionoros.ru

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