August 15’s religious holiday, one of the most prominent in the Orthodox Christian calendar, is the Dormition of the Virgin, when both the western and eastern churches commemorate the death–or “falling asleep,” denoting a state of spiritual peace–and resurrection of the Virgin Mary. In Greece, the holiday is viewed as the “summer Easter”, with the Dormition fast lasting from August 1 until the eve of the feast.

Athens News Agency/ Haris Laskaris.

In a To BHMA International podcast (part of the “Explaining Greece” series) last week, the academic and researcher Effi Fokas noted that the meaning of the mid-summer religious holiday “varies drastically among the Greek population, and we can’t really generalize what it means for the country as a whole. For many, and the number is growing, it simply means a day on which it’s absolutely certain they won’t have to work and around which they can plan their summer holidays. And within that portion of the population, some either don’t know there’s a religious feast involved (after all, we generally refer to it as simply dekapentavgousto, which just means ‘the 15th of August’), while others take it for granted that the secular and religious overlap and won’t think any further about it.”

While the epicenter of the August 15 feast is the Cycladic Island of Tinos, Fokas underlined that “I don’t think there’s any corner of Greece where this holiday is not celebrated. Every church will have a service celebrating the Dormition of Mary… Now, whether people will attend that service is another matter.”

Tinos

The island of Tinos, located in the central Aegean and part of the Cyclades group, is associated with the feast’s most reverent liturgies since the isle’s main cathedral, the Panagia Evangelistria (Our Lady of Good Tidings), is Greece’s primary Marian shrine.

The island’s spiritual significance is one of the reasons Tinos enjoys a reputation as a tranquil and more family-oriented island than neighboring Mykonos, which is known as a celebrity-laden “party isle”, or tourism-heavy Paros and Naxos.

Adding to the “national component” of the August 15 celebrations on Tinos is the fact that the island was the setting for a dastardly attack against the “Elli”, a light cruiser of the Hellenic Navy, by an Italian submarine on August 15, 1940 – a precursor for Mussolini’s failed invasion of northwest Greece a few months later.

Caught unawares by a “sneak attack” that was never even acknowledged by fascist Italy at the time, the “Elli” sank in the harbor ceremonially decked out for the celebration.

The protected cruiser Elli was sunk on August 15, 1940, while near the island of Tinos, by the italian submarine Delfino during celebrations of the Feast of the Dormition of theTheotokos, months before the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War./ Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Panagia Soumela

The most notable August 15 pilgrimage in northern Greece is located on the slopes of Mount Vermio in Imathia prefecture.

The Panagia Soumela Monastery is named for the historic and ancient (4th century AD) Soumela Monastery which stands near the shores of the Black Sea in the Pontus region of modern-day Turkey. The latter is now a museum.

The Divine Liturgy for the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary on August 15, 2013, at the historic Monastery of Panagia Soumela in the Pontus region, presided over by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew./ Athens News Agency, Dimitris Panagos

The monastery on Mount Vermio was built by ethnic Greeks who fled the Pontus for Greece in the wake of the 1923 population exchange between the country and the newly-established Republic of Turkey.

Today’s the new Panagia Soumela is home to a celebrated icon of the Mother of God known as the Panagia Gorgoepekoos, which is said to have been painted by the Apostle Luke himself.

The revered icon was transferred from the Byzantine Museum in Athens to be kept permanently at the new monastery when it was consecrated in 1951.