Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Nicky Antoniou, Helen Leara, Christina Anastas, Christina Ginos, Carol Kamburis
White-aproned, Mike Kamburis and Nick Tharenos stand in front of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, sweating through their ball caps as they shave the browned bits off a 30-pound cylinder of spiced lamb. “This is a real gyro,” Kamburis declares. “You see? All the fat goes out.” As flames lick the cone through a metal grill, he slides out the tray below, a bubbly pale-yellow liquid sloshing in it.
“I’m born in Greece,” he tells me, “in Paradisi. That’s where Nick’s dad came from, too. Everybody in St. Louis [who’s from Rhodes] is from Paradisi.”
“During the immigration a lot of our forefathers came to St. Louis and went into the grocery business,” Tharenos explains. “You know the Karagiannis family? They have Spiro’s and The Tenderloin Room at The Chase? Those guys started out as busboys.”
A construction worker crosses Forest Park Parkway to ask, “What else you guys got goin’ today?”
They tell him about the pork tenderloin kebabs and, inside, the lemon cod and pastitsio and spanakopita.
Inside, the women stand ready in their blue aprons, Kamburis’ daughter Carol among them. An elderly man sits, taking a breather. “That’s Ed Ferretti—he’s 95,” Carol whispers. “He’s Italian; married a Greek in 1943. Her mother threatened to wear a black veil to the wedding.”
Ferretti (whose grandson owns Circle 7 Ranch and Mandarin) remembers when the Greek Festival on Labor Day was a church picnic with a dunking booth. Now, it and these year-round “Festival Favorites” lunches (11 a.m.–2 p.m. Fridays) help keep the church alive.
I ask, wistfully, what gives Greeks here such a strong identity. “It’s just like My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” Carol says. “Our culture is so strong, you either embrace it, or you’re in the outer circle. I also think it’s that whole ‘Greeks invented everything’ thing—democracy, government, sports, medicine, math. It’s a shame they can’t get their crap together now.”
What would it be like, I wonder, to come from such an ancient tradition, to cook with recipes unchanged for centuries… “They’re not even documented,” Carol says. “We’re trying to get them down before somebody gets hit by a truck and it’s all gone.”
Dianne Zotos nods: “My husband remembers going to his yia-yia’s house in Epirus, and they had these huge sheets of phyllo dough lying over dining room chairs to dry.” St. Nick’s actually—heresy—buys its phyllo, but she’s just finished supervising the buttering and layering of thousands of sheets to make 437 pans of spanakopita. They line a dedicated mop bucket with cheesecloth to squeeze out all the spinach.
Johanna Spanos remembers when they got “all this beautiful new kitchen equipment, and nobody would use it. The Rhodian ladies were back there making the galaktoboureko custard two pans at a time on the stove. So I got on a stool [she’s 4-foot-something] with a big paddle and poured in 80 half-gallons of milk. They wanted me to fail so bad! And I’m nervous using the new equipment, ’cause really you should have a double boiler, so I was praying the whole time.”
Now 81, she’s been “kicked out of the kitchen,” so she flies to Greece every year and brings back jewelry, crosses, and souvenirs to sell at the festival. “One year, she was wearing all the good jewelry and trying to get through customs,” Christina Ginos tells me, “and her husband denied knowing her.”
Spanos grins. “Now I go in a wheelchair, and I give them a few bucks, and I don’t have any problems,” she says. “I go to all these places I don’t think I want to tell you, places it looks like nobody’s there, and the man comes and opens the door and I go up to the third floor and there’s a whole bunch of people—they are trying to hide so they don’t have to pay taxes!”
A 7-year-old girl approaches, ponytail bouncing, and announces that maybe she’ll do the sodas today. “You would know our beverages,” she tells me. “We have Pepsi and Sprite. But the other things are complicated.” In the Greek community, everyone’s included—and expected to participate—in everything. Old people don’t sit apologetically on the sidelines, watching “the young ones” dance—they’re in the circle, teaching the toddlers the Kalamatianós. Kids work. Teens don’t have a chance to feel alienated.
Outside, the cone of lamb is now an hourglass, most of it already drizzled with homemade tzatziki and folded into pita that’s been brushed with olive oil and grilled. Customers are lining up. Ginos laughs about the mispronunciations: “Jye-roh, wee-roh, weirdo.” It turns out she was close, growing up, to my friend Anne Jemas, who’s now in Massachusetts and whose father was a pillar of St. Nick’s.
I call Anne to relay messages. “What we call you people is non-Greeks!” she teases, remembering how, when outsiders smelled the kebabs and started coming to the church picnic, the smooth circle dances went herky-jerky. Still, the Greeks kept being Greeks. “My uncle Milton would dance in front of the church with a tray of drinks on his head.” I can hear the laughter in her voice, and the homesickness. “I grew up in a village.”
