Volunteers gear up for Grecian Festival
Preparations have already started for the Grecian Festival 2016 at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church that will run Sept. 8-11.
“Close to 100 people volunteer for the food preparations and nearly 200 people for the setup and running of the festival during the four days,” said the Rev. Peter Thornberg. “The volunteers already started baking the desserts in late July. They were making chicken stock from poultry bones on Thursday. It goes into the avgolemono soup and into the rice pilaf.”
Thornberg said the fall festival was started nine years ago to help the church pay off the mortgage on the new church building, which was built in 2011 and 2012.
“It is a community event not only for the parish but for the wider community. It helps us share our faith and our culture and it is a fun event for our community,” Thornberg said. “People ask about it with bated breath. There are people that come year after year. I think everyone enjoys themselves.”
A group of parishioners and Thornberg give tours of the church building and cultural center during the festival.
“We bring people in and they can see the iconography,” he said. “The iconographers are coming back the week after the festival to add new images.”
Tons of Fun of Douglassville has operated the rides at the festival for more than 10 years.
The menu served by the volunteers includes spanakopita, pastichio, slouvakia, gyros, dolmades and lamb shank.
“Lamb shank is one of the most popular things people come for,” Thornberg said. “It falls right off the bone.”
The desserts include baklava, galaktoboureko, loukoumades and Greek coffee.
The parish started in the 1960s with immigrants
from Greece settling in the Norristown area. In the early 1970s services were held monthly in the lower level of the Commonwealth Bank building on West Main Street. The Hellenic Civic Association purchased another building on Main Street and it was used for seven years for services, according to the church history.
In 1981 the church purchased the former Pentecostal Church on Center Avenue in West Norriton. In July 1991, the 8-acre property on South Trooper Road was purchased and construction of the cultural center began after the Oct. 10, 1993, ground breaking. The new church building was officially opened on April 7, 2012.
The church currently has 225 families and has experienced “slow steady growth,” Thornberg said.
“We have parishioners that come as far as Coatesville, Hatfield, Souderton and Pottstown,” he said. “We are lucky that we are so close to Route 422, Route 202 and the Schuylkill Expressway.”
The festival is open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. from Sept. 8 to Sept. 10 and noon to 7 p.m., Sept. 11, at 900 S. Trooper Road. The indoor restaurant in the cultural center is open each day, and the outdoor tent opens at 5 p.m. Friday.
“This church is proof that miracles happen. We were less than 200 families when the building project started and taking on a mortgage was certainly a risk,” Thornberg said. “It was leap of faith to take it on.”