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An Epipany to remember
His All Holiness Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church, visits Tarpon Springs to mark its 100th Epiphany celebration. (St. Petersburg Times)
[Times photo: Carrie Pratt 2005]
From 2005: Catherine Velardocchia, 14, the dove bearer, holds the dove before the tossing of the cross during the Epiphany celebration while Archbishop Demetrios speaks to the crowd at Spring Bayou on Thursday morning.
Epiphany: 1906-2006 An Epipany to remember
His All Holiness Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church, visits Tarpon Springs to mark its 100th Epiphany celebration.
By ROBIN STEIN
Published January 3, 2006
Full coverage
TARPON SPRINGS - Here at the end of a beaten brick road, beneath a canopy of live oaks and date palms, is Spring Bayou, the center of the annual Orthodox Christian rite that has earned this small seaside town the name "Epiphany City."
Year after year, tens of thousands of visitors descend upon Tarpon Springs for Epiphany, a multiday festival of Greek folk culture and Orthodox ceremonies in honor of the baptism of Jesus Christ and the revelation of the Holy Trinity.
On the morning of Jan. 6, onlookers from Tampa, Atlanta, Ontario and New York all funnel into the narrow streets circling the bayou to cheer dozens of young Greek men who dive into the brackish waters in search of an anointed wooden cross.
Also known as the Twelfth Night and the Feast of the Holy Theophany, Epiphany is celebrated by the 250-million members of the Orthodox Church all over the world.
Robed priests lead processions in the fishing villages of Corfu, Kalymnos, Greece, and Botany Bay in Sydney, Australia, blessing seas, lakes and rivers and sprinkling droplets of holy water to cleanse and give hope to their parishioners. There, too, young Orthodox men retrieve crosses symbolizing Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River.
But nowhere in the world, perhaps, does the ancient ritual take on the pageantry or scale that it does here. The event often doubles Tarpon Springs' population of 23,000.
This year, more than 80,000 people are expected to attend as the city marks its centennial Epiphany with a celebration of unprecedented pomp and spiritual significance.
Among the expected guests are cultural and political leaders from around the United States, Europe, Asia, and, most notably, the worldwide spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church, His All Holiness Bartholomew.
For more than a year, community leaders have been preparing for the patriarch's first trip from Istanbul to Florida.
"We're excited and humbled that His All Holiness Bartholomew will be commemorating this milestone anniversary with us," said William Planes, chairman of the 2006 Patriarchal Epiphany Visitation committee. "His presence makes this year's celebration a true landmark event."
"That's who I'm nervous to meet," said Dunedin High School senior Christos Argeras, who will be one of the 56 young men diving for the cross this year. "I don't know what I will say, but I think it will be an honor to meet him."
As he prepares for his third and final dive, Argeras, 18, said his approach has changed.
"I used to practice when I first did it," Argeras said.
Now, he said it doesn't matter who catches the cross.
"We believe God gave it to him for a reason," he says of the cross and the young man who retrieves it.
"I let them know it's a liturgy, not a sporting event," said Aleck Alissandratos, 47, who has been mentoring the yearly crop of 16- to 18-year-old divers for nearly two decades.
"It changed my life as an 18-year-old," said Alissandratos, who retrieved the cross in 1977. "My sons will be doing it in a few years."
The Alissandratos family has been in Tarpon Springs since Aleck's grandfather came to town just after the turn of the last century. It is one of the many families in the area that have watched generation after generation of fathers and sons, uncles and cousins dive for the Epiphany cross since Tarpon Springs hosted its first celebration in 1906.
A decade after the incorporation of the city of Tarpon Springs, the rich sponge beds along the Gulf Coast drew a wave of Greek sponge divers and merchants. They built ships, docks and packinghouses along the Anclote River, creating what looked like a Mediterranean village and transforming what had been a vacation spot for wealthy industrialists into the sponging capital of the world.
Within a few years the immigrants from Greece founded St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, named for the patron saint of mariners and modeled after St. Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople.
One hundred years later, there is a SunTrust Bank in the building that was once occupied by the ship chandlery founded by Alissandratos' grandfather. The area has grown and diversified, and few still make a living from the sponge trade.
Still, Tarpon Springs remains home to one of the nation's most vibrant and concentrated Greek-American communities. St. Nicholas Orthodox Church is now a cathedral and host to one of the world's largest Epiphany celebrations.
Before day breaks this Friday, the normally quiet banks of Spring Bayou will be swarmed by Greeks and non-Greeks, Christians and non-Christians alike, all staking out a good view.
Around noon, when the procession from the cathedral arrives, the divers will scramble into a flotilla of wooden dinghies, brace for the toss and plunge into the shallow bayou. Scouring the rocky surface, one will come upon the coveted cross and emerge for a special blessing, this year, from the ecumenical patriarch himself.
