Epiphany Celebration

Tarpon Springs hosts one of the largest Epiphany celebrations outside of Greece.  So, what is this Epiphany celebration all about?

Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Tarpon Springs

Tarpon Springs has more Greeks per capita than any other American city. The Epiphany celebration in Tarpon Springs dates back to 1906.  It's the largest Epiphany celebration in North America and draws more than 20,000 spectators, about as many people who live in Tarpon Springs.  My guess is that half those in attendance are residents, the other half are visitors.

The period between Christmas and Epiphany is called Dodecameron, or the Twelve Days. It is considered one continuous festive period and is where the term “Twelve Days of Christmas” is derived. Epiphany, also called the Theophany (meaning “appearance of God”), celebrates the baptism of Jesus Christ in the River Jordan by St. John the Baptist. The first account of an Epiphany celebration is attributed to Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 A.D.).  (Information is from the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral website)

Above is this year's schedule.  From the night of the 5th through the night of the 6th it is a very busy celebration.

What most non-Greek people think of the most when they say "Are you attending Epiphany this year?" is the tossing of the cross into Spring Bayou.  20,000 or so people line the banks of the Bayou.  At the appropriate time, the highest Ecclesiastic Authority in attendance, typically an Archbishop, reads out of the holy book the Baptism of Jesus by John, he blesses the Cross and the Waters, a Dove is released by a young lady, and then he tosses the Cross into the Bayou.  The boys, ages 16-18 years old, jump into the water to find the cross which sinks down into the water. The Cross is 'found' and raised up out of the water by the young man who has probably fought off others who try to take it away before he breaches the surface.  They all swim over to the platform where the Archbishop is, and the young Cross bearer is blessed by the Archbishop, and then he is raised on the shoulders of the other swimmers and carried back to the Church.

Note:  The pictures above were taken by me in past years.  The pictures below are from news sources of previous Epiphany Celebrations.

 

 

The Dove is Released.

 

The Cross Swimmers are headed to the boats which are in a half circle...

...the cross is tossed into the middle, they dive into the water and the fight is on.  Note the boys in diving position on the boats waiting for the Cross Toss.

 The Cross is retrieved and held high into the air.

The young man who retrieved the Cross is carried back by the other swimmers to the church with Cross and Trophy in hand.  This young man is "SUPPOSED" to be blessed for the rest of the year...but the reality is that with some of the young men it has been more of a curse...but we won't go there...

The celebration moves over to the Sponge Docks where food and music are made part of the festivities.  That night the Epiphany Ball is held and there are unofficial fireworks and celebrations until the wee hours of the night throughout Tarpon Springs and the surrounding area.  (Yes Indy, you will have to deal with some fireworks tomorrow night, but it won't be too bad here in our neighborhood.)

FYI:  We do not attend any of the celebration, but have watched the Cross Toss via live television which includes four or five helicopters and numerous news people scattered all over the celebration area.

Hurricane Passes 200 Miles to our West

Home in Holiday / Tarpon Springs area, FL

Around 6:30 Tuesday night I went to one of our favorite gulf picture taking locations, Crystal Beach Florida.  This is looking out to the west…the group of islands out there is Honeymoon Island State Park…beyond that is the Gulf, and those clouds out there are part of Hurricane Michael.

The flag at Crystal Beach, which is a community within Palm Harbor…not really a ‘Beach’ as one would think of Clearwater Beach, or other real beaches in our area…but the flag was flying due west, but it was a light wind…had I got the picture just 15 seconds earlier, the flag was still. 

Last night we have a few downpours, had a constant 10-15 mph wind with a few gusts up in the 20’s to 30’s, and just a few downpours which lasted for very short periods of time…as shown in the picture above.

    

Marcia and I went back around 11 am today to see the difference between last night and today.  Around 1:15 it will be high tide, and they are expecting another foot or so from what it was when we went by.  Above you can see that the pole on the far left with a bird on it does not show up in the picture to the right…and in the picture to the right where a bird looks to be standing on water, it was standing on the pole which is clearly above water in the picture to the left.

    

These two pictures above clearly show how much higher the water is.  Now compare that to the same trees taken back in December 2016 below…

…the vegetation is much more mature today…but look at how low the water “normally” is!  A vast difference.

   

Here is the fishing pier taken today (left), and the same pier taken back in December 2016.

And this is what happens when you take your lens off in a air conditioned car, step out to take a picture in the 85 degree, 110% humidity … my eyeglasses did the same thing!

Here is an area in Tarpon Springs.  The boat dock, which does not float, has only another foot or so before it is under water.  The sea wall has about two feet before the water comes over it.  Last night there was a fisherman here and I asked him how high it was last night compared to other times.  He said that last year during the hurricane that passed through to the east of Tarpon Springs, that the water level was way, way down…the winds were pushing the water out away from shore, unlike the hurricane Tuesday which was to the west…it all depends upon which way the wind blows.

      

As I write this, the category 4 hurricane has hit the Mexico Beach area of Florida, just to the east of Panama City and Tyndall AFB, and just to the west of Port St. Joe and the Apalachicola River Wildlife area.  Devastation is going to huge…wind and storm surge has never hit this area during our the history of our nation.  The storm will do damage all the way up into Georgia..and in the Carolinas.  By Thursday it will be in the Atlantic…leaving a wake of clean-up…and who knows how many deaths. 

LoveBugs and Thunderstorms

Home in Holiday / Tarpon Springs area, FL

Until I got to Arkansas I really did not understand the term “LoveBugs” very well.  I knew, growing up in the 50’s through 70’s, that the VW Beetle was referred to as a “lovebug”, and as a former owner of one, I KNOW it is not from what one can do in the back seat…way too small. (Mom, don’t ask me how I know)

Meet the true Florida LoveBugs (Plecia nearctica) .  These bugs love to, umm, how do you put it…’connect’, and then they stay ‘connected’ for days, flying around, getting into one’s hair, on clothing, covering outside doors and windows, and, of course….

 

…they LOVE motorhomes…and cars…and anything moving.  YES, this is really a motorhome (not ours) covered in lovebugs and other flying things.  Marcia and I saw a motorhome a few years ago up near Tallahassee, a white motorhome, just COVERED in squished lovebugs.  They came up Interstate 75…we came up US-19, and we hardly had any of them.  They LOVE the middle section of Florida, and are very active (if you know what I mean) during Spring and Summer, and I would assume, early Fall (since today is the first day of Fall).  Now I tried to get a picture of them flying…but when I tried I just could not focus.  Anyway, lovebugs are best photographed SQUISHED.

So far, home for seven straight days, and seven days of afternoon thunderstorms.  Now it doesn’t rain at the condo each day…but we hear the thunder and see the lightning, and it has rained half of the days…twice very, very hard.  Yesterday was one of those heavy days.  Around 4 pm, the storms moved in.  It was in the low 90’s, and quickly dropped down to the upper 70’s.  By 5:30, it was gone…and the temps moved back up to the mid-80’s, with puddles of water everywhere.  Talk about a humid evening!  But at least it was a bit cooler.

This is a look to the east along the Anclote River in Tarpon Springs, near the Sponge Docks.  The Anclote is less than 30 miles long, formed from springs and creeks, and runs down into the Gulf of Mexico.  The Sponge Docks are right on the river.

The Sponge Docks are on Dodecanese Boulevard, which means "twelve islands" (even though it represents 15 larger and 150 smaller Islands in the southeastern Aegean Sea, off the coast of Asia Minor (Turkey), of which 26 are inhabited.)  Just ahead of me is one of the many Jolley Trolley cars which run from the city of Clearwater, through Dunedin, Palm Harbor and to the Tarpon Springs sponge docks.  Another route goes from Clearwater Beach, down to St. Petersburg and also over to the city of Clearwater (where you can pick up the northern route to Tarpon Springs).  For $5, you can ride it all day long, and the Trolleys are fairly heavily used.

Along the docks you can typically see some of the Greek spongers and fishermen sitting or working on their boats.  Don’t get too close to any of the sponge boats as they are cleaning the sponges…the smell is a bit difficult to handle.

Near the end of the docks is a popular restaurant called “Rusty Bellies”, and you can see the storm clouds to the west over the restaurant.

Here is Spring Bayou, where each Greek New Year the Archbishop tosses a white cross into the water in celebration of Holy Epiphany, and the young men of the Greek Church (16-18 years of age) jump in to retrieve it.  The crowd is HUGE, this is one celebration which I doubt I will ever witness in person…seeing it on the news is good enough for me.

I finally made it over to the Crystal Beach area in northern Palm Harbor.  This is one of my favorite places to take pictures of the gulf in this area.

Although it was still 45 minutes before sunset, I got the pictures I wanted…and besides, I told Marcia I would only be gone an hour…make that 70 minutes since I decided to go down through the Sponge Dock area.  (During winter it would have taken an extra 20 minutes due to the crowds!)   And NO, it did not rain in our area today.  It is 8:30 pm and it is 84 degrees, 65% humidity…lovely…

Funeral of a Hero

Before the shooting early last Sunday morning, I had never heard of “Officer K”, as they referred to Officer Charles Kondek, who died in the line of duty.  Very quickly they put up a memorial in front of the police station in Tarpon Springs.  

Yesterday Marcia and I went by to pay our respects, and we too, along with hundreds of others, left some flowers.  We also bought a memorial shirt and two wrist bands, sold by the Sun Coast Police Benevolent Association with the proceeds going to the family.  We gave the shirt to Marcia’s brother Mike, who once served on the force, and a wrist band to his daughter Alysia, who is a member of the Pinellas Sheriff’s department where she works at the County Jail….Marcia is wearing the other wrist band.

As you can see, this is quite an outpouring from the community and from fellow officers.  While there we ran into a friend of Marcia and Mikes, Harry, who was very somber.  He use to volunteer on the force years ago, and currently works for one of the Pinellas County DMV offices.  It was nice to see him again, wish the circumstances were different.

We watched the two hour funeral on TV this morning, which concluded with police officers loading the casket into the hearse.  It was a very emotional service, which included his young 15 year old daughter giving an amazing eulogy of her father, where she said, "My dad was a phenomenal father, husband and, of course, police officer….My dad died as a hero, but he was my hero before any of yours." How she said what she said without a break in her voice is beyond me….Marcia and I had tears in our eyes, and neither of us could speak.  We also heard stories from fellow police officers, and from his Pastor and the Pastor of Idlewild Baptist Church, a church nearby which is big enough to handle a crowd like this.  

The funeral procession route is shown on this map above. “A” is where the funeral was held, “B” is Tarpon Springs, and “C” is the cemetery.  With the procession passing within a block of our condo, we went down and parked along Highway 19, and wow…..it blew us away.

Our timing could not have been better.  Here the hearse had just turned from Alt. 19 onto highway 19 headed north to Hudson.  About a dozen motorcycles and police cars had already passed, and police had been stationed along the route from the time the funeral had ended.  By now the funeral had been over for about 75 minutes….so it took a good hour just to reach our location.

If you look beyond the hearse, you see cars headed southbound which have been stopped…and people are getting out of their cars.  No complaints, no honking horns, people who are caught in the moment and have accepted that to show respect to the officers and the family is more important than the destination they are headed to.  And boy were they going to be late!

It is hard to pick out the shots to share.  This shot is facing to the north, around 100 police cars and emergency vehicles have passed by, and then this precession of motorcycles….with active officers leading the way, and retired officers on their own bikes close behind…around a hundred motorcycles I figure.

   

By now the motorcycles are way down the road, and they were followed by another precession of police cars, about another hundred or so just since the motorcycles went past.

And although there some stragglers still, this was just about the end of it.  I think the stragglers were made up of officers who had blocked off streets along Alt. 19 in Tarpon Springs.  But here is a pretty good look at the crowd along highway 19 in Holiday showing their respects on both sides of the highway.  What looked like just a few when we arrived, turned out to be a nice little crowd…and I am sure it was like this all the way through Holiday, through New Port Richey, through Port Richey and into Hudson. I can only imagine what it was like in Tarpon Springs.

While I was taking pictures out along the street, Marcia was using the other camera and getting pictures of the different Police Cars as they go by.  Above is a Tarpon Springs car.  Everyone on the Tarpon Springs Police force were able to attend the funeral because the County took over all the police calls for the day.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

And we did not even get them all!  I have been to a number of funerals, even conducted a few in my day way back.  When I was 17 my Geometry Teacher died just months after he saw two of his girls, both friends of mine, graduate from High School…I was asked to be a Pall Bearer, and I was honored to do so.  That was a very large funeral.  I have seen a few military funerals, and they are something else.  But I have seen nothing like this except on television, and as you see all these police cars, and fire trucks, and ambulances, and un-marked cars going down the street with their lights flashing, some with sirens blaring, let me tell you, it puts a lump in your throat, it brings tears to your eyes, and it makes you proud to be an American…and it gets you angry over the senseless death of a wonderful father, husband, and policeman…and with everything going on in this land where THUGS are trying to rule the land and blame is being placed on these fine men and women, it is enough to make one sick.