The Sacred Drama of Μεγάλη Εβδομάδα: A Tantric Invitation to Feel It All

In the Streets of Athens… 

In the streets of Athens, the air is charged. It was a full moon this past weekend, and there was another protest this week. We’re all a little extra on edge. 

The sacred drama begins, and the melodrama of daily life mirrors it—everything is heightened. 

Rebirth is approaching, but first… fire. 

Holy Week in Catholicism is called Big Week in Greek Orthodox Easter. 

And it is. Bigger incense. 

Bigger grief. 

Bigger silence. 

Bigger hair appointments. 

Last year, I was living in the suburbs, where wisteria climbed the villas and calla lilies and trumpet flowers bloomed through the night. 

The silence of Big Week brought in the reverence and size of resurrection. The grief felt cosmic. Christmas is sweet in Greece, but really—it’s not a big deal. Gifts are exchanged at Epiphany. 

But Easter? Easter is everything. The hair salons are booked. The spas are booked. The butcher is out of lamb a week ahead. 

The entire country prepares—not just spiritually, but bodily—for resurrection. 

Last night, I walked Lilly through Kolonaki just after sunset. The air was velvet-soft, holding the heat of the day, and I could hear the long, low bell from a nearby church pulsing through the marble streets. 

Incense drifted from balconies like a prayer you can smell. 

A group of women were gathered outside the local chapel, arranging lilies and crimson carnations around an icon of the Virgin. 

Their hands moved slowly, reverently—this wasn’t decoration, it was devotion. I paused with Lilly under a blooming orange tree, watching them. T

he scent of citrus mixed with smoke and wax. In that moment, I felt something ancient stir in my chest. It wasn’t sadness exactly—it was the ache of remembering something I never learned but always knew. 

Big Week in Greece does that to you. It bypasses intellect and moves through the senses. You don’t need to be Orthodox to feel it. 

The city becomes a temple. 

The collective energy shifts, slows, deepens, listens. 

Last year, on Good Friday, I stumbled upon a procession by accident. I wasn’t looking for it, but there it was: the Epitaphios, covered in flowers, moving through the street like a floating tomb. 

People stood in silence, holding candles close to their hearts. I found myself crying without knowing why. That’s the thing about this week—it sneaks into the body. It doesn’t ask for belief. Just presence. Just breath. Just willingness to let the grief move through and alchemize you.

Why ‘Big’ Matters: A Language of the Body What is the difference between Holy Week and Big Week? 

In my experience, Holy Week is a week of obligation. There are moral imperatives around what to do, how to behave, how to reflect. 

It often becomes about compliance: quiet reverence, solemnity, tradition through the lens of duty. Big Week, at least in Greece, feels different. 

It’s not just religious, it’s theatrical, sensual, deeply embodied. 

As an observer, it feels like sacred drama: preparation, cleansing, clearing, purifying, grieving, and resurrection. It’s a collective remembering of how to lament, how to grieve and lean on each other, and ultimately how to leave it outside the church, outside the tomb, outside the body. 

It’s a ritual of release. 

My mother died two years ago after a long illness. My grief still comes in waves, and it deepens my Tantric practice every day. 

Some days, I’m filled with gratitude—for the conversations we had, for the grace that she got to see me sober, for the few lucid moments we shared in her final months. 

And then there are days when I would give anything for just thirty more minutes. 

When the tears surprise me in the middle of something ordinary. 

The waves of grief are both tender and vast. The well seems bottomless. But as long as I allow myself to swim in it, to let it move me, the grief becomes a kind of prayer. A richness. A beauty. 

I feel a stronger sense of my mother now, two years after her passing, than I did before. The grief, rather than being paralyzing, has become alchemical. And I credit my Tantric path for that: for showing me how to stay with the wave until it reshapes me.

Cultural Interlude: A History Written in the Body 

Big Week in Greece isn’t just a set of religious services. 

It’s a cultural phenomenon, a week when the entire country enters into embodied ritual. 

Rooted in Eastern Orthodox liturgy and steeped in Byzantine drama, each day of Μεγάλη Εβδομάδα is an energetic rite of passage. 

Greeks don’t just remember the Passion of Christ. They re-live it. 

In villages and cities alike, you feel the shift: bells tolling, incense wafting, women preparing the tomb with flowers, processions winding through the streets. 

The entire nation becomes a collective body, moving through grief, reverence, and anticipation. This sacred drama echoes much older rites. 

Long before Christ, the Mediterranean honored gods of death and return—Dionysus, Adonis, Persephone. 

The rituals of Big Week—mourning, cleansing, fasting, waiting—sit atop ancient spring mysteries tied to fertility, resurrection, and transformation. Even the red eggs cracked at midnight aren’t just Orthodox symbols. They harken back to goddess worship, blood rites, and the cosmic womb. 

One beloved legend tells that after the resurrection, Mary Magdalene traveled to Rome to proclaim the miracle to Emperor Tiberius. 

She held out a simple white egg and declared, “Christ is risen.” 

He scoffed, saying a man rising from the dead was as likely as that egg turning red. In her hand, the egg turned the color of blood. 

A miracle. 

A symbol. 

A transmission of the sacred, born through the hand of a woman. 

In this way, Big Week isn’t just Orthodox. It’s archetypal. It’s a feminine descent. A Tantric spiral inward. A culture-wide yoni of sacred pause before resurrection.

Big Week is a Ritual of the Senses 

This week is not experienced through thought. 

It’s felt through the skin, the belly, the breath. 

In Greece, Big Week unfolds like a multi-sensory ritual: you smell it, you taste it, you hear it echo through the night. 

The scent of incense clings to your hair after just walking by a chapel. Red wax drips down your hand as you cradle your candle through the street. 

The chants, minor key and mournful, wrap around you like a velvet shawl. Even the bread feels sacred this week. 

The koulourakia, the tsoureki, braided and spiced with mahlepi and mastiha… there’s holiness in every bite. 

On Big Saturday last year, I was invited to a rooftop dinner after the midnight liturgy. We cracked red eggs together, laughing like children, yolk still warm from the center. 

We toasted with lamb so tender it fell apart on the fork, we were giddy from being awake for so long. It was joy and grief in equal measure—resurrection as feast, as flesh, as flame. In Tantra, sensory immersion is not distraction. 

It’s sacred technology. We use the body to anchor us into presence. We taste to pray. We smell to remember. 

We touch to come home. 

Big Week, at its core, teaches this truth: resurrection lives in the senses. And to resurrect fully, we have to descend fully, into the smells, the salt, the softness, the sound.

The Feminine Descent Before the Resurrection 

Resurrection always begins in the dark. 

In Tantra, the descent is not something to avoid. 

It’s a rite. 

A conscious movement into the shadow, the silence, the womb. 

It is death, but not the end. 

It is the sacred pause that comes before rebirth. 

The letting go of identity, control, narrative. 

This is Holy Saturday energy. The day after death. 

The ache of not knowing what comes next. It’s the cave of Inanna, who strips herself bare at every gate. 

It’s Mary, holding her son’s broken body, letting the world end for a moment before it begins again. 

It’s Hecate, keeper of the threshold, watching with wild wisdom in the dark. 

After my mother died, I thought the worst of the grief would pass in the first year. 

But it didn’t. 

The second year was quieter, and somehow deeper. 

More intimate. 

There were mornings I couldn’t move. 

I just lay still, wrapped in memory and silence. 

But I didn’t fight it. 

I let the descent have me. 

And something divine happened there. 

I started to hear her; not as she was in the hospital, but as she was when I was little. 

Laughing. Strong. Soft. 

The descent became communion. 

The stillness became a temple. 

This is what the sacred feminine knows: 

You don’t rush the resurrection. 

You let yourself go dark. 

You stay. 

And in that staying, something is born.

Practices for a Tantric Big Week 

For Big Week, wherever you are in the world, I invite a practice. 

Every day: light something, smell something, sit with something. 

Sit with a pain you’ve shelved for another time. 

An emotional scab you’ve protected or coddled. 

A grief you keep promising to feel when the time is right.

 A pattern that’s masquerading as truth, when really, it’s just a pattern. 

Use the senses to make it sacred. Light a candle. Burn incense. Crush herbs. Rub your chest with oil. Smell flowers. Anoint your belly. Let your body be the altar where death becomes life. 

The part of you that dies this week isn’t gone. 

It’s compost. 

It makes space. 

It clears the room for your own resurrection. 

My great-aunt had a scripture painting on her wall—a butterfly in flight beside these words from 

Revelation 21:4–5: “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’” 

That verse has stayed with me. 

Because it doesn’t just speak to salvation. 

It speaks to renewal. And renewal only comes when we tell the truth. 

So connect with us here in Greece this Big Week. 

As the week progresses, the women will lament, and cleanse, and prepare a feast. 

For resurrection. 

For new life. 

For the mystery that lives in the middle of the flame.

Closing: A Devotional Invitation 

Big Week isn’t a rule to follow. 

It’s a rhythm to feel. 

It’s not a religious obligation. 

It’s a sacred invitation to live wide open. 

To stretch your soul until it aches. 

To let the grief move, the incense rise, the body soften. 

You don’t need to believe in doctrine to feel resurrection. 

You only need to be willing to die a little. 

To lay something down. 

To make room. 

This week is the spiral inward. 

Next week is the fire. 

The return. 

The breath. 

The wild, erotic aliveness of being reborn in your own skin. 

Tonight, I sit in candlelight with the windows open. The bells ring in the distance, slow and aching.

 My body is quiet but alert, like the earth before a storm. 

I’m not rushing to be anywhere else. I am just here. 

Breathing. Becoming. 

Waiting for the light to rise from the dark. 

Let this week take you there too. 

Let yourself feel it all: grief, longing, memory, devotion. 

Not because you should. But because this is how we return to the body. This is how we meet resurrection not as a metaphor, but as truth.