Video: Become Greek for a week(end) at Dallas’ three-day Greek Food Festival

by Lena Dirbashi

DALLAS — It is 8:30 a.m. Betty and Olga Bithos, twin sisters, are on their way to the Greek Orthodox Church in Dallas with their father. As they join the others from the small Greek community, the girls are prepping for a festival celebrating Greek food and culture. The year is 1967.

Forty-six years later, the Greek community has grown by thousands and the church relocated to a huge complex in North Dallas near the intersection of Hillcrest and Alpha.

To this day, the Bithos twins are still waking up at 8:30 a.m to help with the festival. You can spot them at the ticket booth, selling admission to the new generation of festivalgoers. It is this close-knit community feeling that has strengthened and prolonged the local Greek community and the reason behind this year’s theme, “Festival of Generations.”

But the Greek community doesn’t celebrate its food festival without the rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which is why each year, the Greek Food Festival posts hard-to-miss bright blue billboards across town. (We have one approximately 100 feet outside our PegNews window!)

In fact, what used to be a small bake-sale has grown into an event that caters to almost 20,000 visitors. There is so much to do that it can get a little overwhelming, the Bithos' say. So they stick to an easy rule: “Eat first!”

They suspect that your eyes will wander directly to the baklava, a pastry that takes months to prepare. Both familiar and unfamiliar palates enjoy baklava, the twins insist, because you cannot go wrong with layers over layers of phyllo dough separated between crushed walnuts as they seep in sweet syrup!

But before you satisfy your sweet tooth, feast on gourmet Greek dishes ranging from gyros, souvlaki, loukaniko, pastitso, dolmathes, and Greek fries. Translation: Slices of lamb wrapped in warm pita bread, kabobs, pork sausage, lasagna, stuffed grape leaves, and fries.

Feeding your stomach is just the beginning. Just a walk around allows your eyes to feast on the authentic dances of Greek village men and women as shades of contrasting colors project on stage. It’ll be impossible to miss the exotic blue watercolors layered around evil-eye necklaces and bracelets -- used to ward off evil eyes -- as they stream down across splashes of orange, yellow, and red belly-dancing scarves hanging from the walls. Roam the cultural exhibit where the maps of Alexander the Great’s world conquests overlook the displays of ancient Greek art and paintings. And finally, take advantage of the free tours back in time with Byzantine architecture and iconography inside the church walls and ceilings. All this and much more will add to the enrichment of the exhilarating, three-day celebration.

If you haven’t gone to these before, this year would be a great time to start with new additions like the Taverna, a beverage bar featuring Greek beer and wine and a Kafenio, a Greek coffee house where they will serve Greek and American coffee.

You can even take a little bit of Greek back home. Agora, or the Greek supermarket, features goods imported from the motherland, as well as the creations of local Greek artists and artisans.  And just in case the ingredients don’t make sense, chefs will be demonstrating their skills so you can take them back to your own kitchen.

“We won’t have fried butter,” Father Christopher Constantinedes, a presiding priest at the Greek Orthodox Church warns, referring to the outrageous offerings of the Texas State Fair, also opening this weekend. “But we will have loukanikos and a mini trip to Greece – the state fair doesn’t give you that!” he adds.

Everything is open and available all day. Festival hours are 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. All three days of the festival are located at the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Dallas at Hillcrest & Alpha.