Creating a Greek Feast for the Yiasou Greek Festival

The first thing you might notice when you walk into the kitchen of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Charlotte are the hundreds and hundreds of little cups of tzatziki sauce.

Two women in aprons are ladling the sauce from 14-kilo buckets into serving cups. They’ve spent the whole afternoon doing this and plan to keep going until the tzatziki is all gone, one of them says.

On the other side of the kitchen, two women use industrial meat cutting machines to fill a huge metal tray with roasted lamb.

This weekend, those lamb dishes and cups of tzatziki will be served to thousands of people at this year’s Yiasou Greek Festival. The festival began in 1978 as a church fundraiser and now draws nearly 45,000 people to Dilworth annually.

As you can imagine, that means a lot of food to prepare. Feta, tomatoes and lettuce need to be chopped, pastries need to be packaged, 3,250kg of chicken need to be roasted and 620 trays of baklava need to be baked.

“It’s the calm before the storm, so to speak,” says Lucy Pappadakes, the church’s choir director and volunteer in the kitchen.

On Tuesday, she filled three 55-gallon drums with homemade syrup. On Wednesday, she packaged stuffed grape leaves. This weekend, she’ll bake spanakopita.

She lifts the lid off a barrel and releases the sweet syrup inside.

“It’s a heavy, simple syrup. We use it in many of our baked goods. It doesn’t contain honey, but it does contain water, sugar, lemon and cinnamon sticks,” she says.

The barrel is almost as big as she is – a fact that makes her laugh when it is pointed out to her.

“Yeah, let’s just say I used 3,000 pounds of sugar this year, just for syrup,” she says.

A long history of Greek cuisine

Like many people in the Greek Orthodox community, Pappadakes has direct ties to Greece.

Her father moved to the United States when he was a teenager around 1910. He later returned to Greece, where he met his wife – Pappadakes’ mother – and the couple moved to Saint Petersburg, Florida in 1953.

Pappadakes was born six years later. She remembers her parents spending a lot of time in the kitchen when she was a child.

“My dad worked in restaurants his whole life, so they had their dishes,” she says. “He had his things that he made and she had her things that she made. I didn’t really get a chance to cook that much at home because it was always just the two of them.”

Through her volunteer work at the festival, she had the opportunity to recreate some of the dishes her parents made for her, such as diples – a fried pastry – and Greek-style chicken.

Sharing favorite dishes is a tradition

Many festival-goers feel a strong connection to food. Some may look forward to a sweet, nutty bite of baklava or ergolavi filled with apricot jam.

“I had a colleague who always came on Friday mornings to pick up her lamb dinner. That was it, and I think she had lived here longer than me at that point,” says Pappadakes.

The Greek Festival is primarily about celebrating Greek culture, but it is also a recognition of the church volunteers and workers who toil in the kitchen to make this festival possible.

The organization has grown significantly since it began volunteering in 2001. But in recent years, it says it has become more difficult to find volunteers, especially young people.

Instead, the church employs more wage workers to make the annual Greek festival possible.

“I hope the next generation will step in when the time comes,” Pappadakes says. “That’s the part that always stays in the back of my mind. I hope we can keep it up.”

But there is hardly any time to think about it – because 45,000 starving people are on the way.

The Yiasou Greek Festival will take place September 6-8 at the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral, 600 East Blvd.