St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church (Seattle) - Bazaars and Festivals

Bazaars and Festivals

St. Demetrios church has hosted numerous bazaars and festivals since 1921. Early bazaars were in November and December, with embroidered and crocheted children's articles (intended as Christmas gifts), coffee, and Greek pastries for sale in the church hall. The importance of these bazaars in the church's finances can be gleaned from a report that the first bazaar (in 1921) raised $3,000 for the church: in 1918, the largest single donation toward the construction of the new church was only $100.

These early bazaars were organized by the Women's Hellenic Club, the Sunday school, and the Greek school. At some point, a raffle was introduced. Through 1959, the bazaars were held in the basement of the church in Cascade.

In 1960 and 1961, the bazaar was held at Eagles Auditorium; the 1961 bazaar included a fashion show. In 1962 and 1963, bazaars were held earlier, in October, at the Norway Center. In 1964, the bazaar was moved to the new Montlake church, where the bazaars and festivals have been hosted ever since. Besides the fundraising, the bazaars now featured tours of the church and lectures about Orthodox Christianity.

The first bazaar at the new church was such a success that the sweets sold out before the end of the first day of the two-day event. The preparation of breads, pastries, and other food for the ever-larger bazaars and festivals would become an increasingly large affair, involving George and Jean Macris' bakery in North Bend, Washington (parishioners would head out days beforehand to help bake hundreds of loaves of tsourekia, a sweet bread), Remo Borracchini's bakery in the Rainier Valley south of downtown, and the kitchens of the Broadway Vocational Institute (now Seattle Central Community College) on Capitol Hill. Matters were somewhat simplified as the church acquired increasingly elaborate kitchens, including several large ovens.

In 1977, the bazaar added an outdoor tent and a broader menu of food (dolmathes, tiropeta, spanakopeta, and souvlakia). Two years later, they began giving gifts of pastries to the neighbors, who were inevitably impacted by the ever-larger event. It became imperative to schedule the bazaar on a weekend when there would be no football game at the University of Washington's nearby Husky Stadium.

The new community center allowed a further expansion of food offerings, with sit-down meals, a Greek delicatessen, complementing the pastries (eventually over 100,000 each year), coffee, and "fair food". Beginning in 1983, the festival—it was now far more than a bazaar—was held even earlier, in September, and transformed into a largely outdoor event utilizing multiple tents (one hosted a taverna), with airplane tickets to Greece as first prize in the raffle. Mayor Charles Royer remarked in 1986 that the Greek festival had become "one of the great assets of the city." The festival continued to grow: once the library was completed in 1988, there were religious books (and, later, secular books on Greece) for sale; demonstrations of icon painting were later added, as were wine tastings, Greek jewelry for sale.

Gross annual profits of the festival are now well into six figures: they passed the $200,000 mark in 1990. The financial benefits to the church and its charitable activities are obvious; while some parishioners hold the opinion that the church should steward its funds more carefully and not need to involve itself in hosting such a large public event, the parish has generally embraced the opportunity to work cooperatively and to expose the broader Seattle community to their form of Christianity.