It’s Tsiknopempti!
Today is Smoked Thursday, one of the Orthodox Christian holidays around Easter and the last day they can eat meat before Lent, so the whole town sets up little grills and cooks up whatever meat they have lying around. Tavernas in town grill up souvlaki and sausages and the whole country celebrates.
We had driven into town just to pick up some supplies, but we kept driving past gatherings of people with a smoking grill, and it became obvious we were going to have to at least check out what was going on. Neither of us were 100%, but we parked by Zimi’s and then headed down the walkplatz to see what we could find. We eventually picked a taverna close to the center of the walkplatz, grabbed a table, and then ordered some drinks and some skewers.
(I didn’t see the sausages until we needed to get back.)
Very happy to get to experience this. It ended up causing us to read a lot more about Greek Orthodox traditions AND to find out that it was likely that the whole town was going to get crazy over the next ten days, since the Greek Orthodox pre-Lent “Apokries” is pretty similar to the Venetian Carnevale, and even though Lefkada wasn’t going to be HUGE, it was going to get pretty populated. Decorations are up all over town, and there are info flyers up around town that have a whole schedule of upcoming events.
(It’s also probably why more and more restaurants around town are opening up — not because the summer season is starting, but because Apokries was coming.)
(Evidently all the leadup to Lent is here is about food — next week is Cheese Week.)