Excerpt from Sam's Description of Easter Week on Patmos

"On the Tuesday after Easter,  you’d have heard firecrackers going off much of the day. Sometimes, it was just children playing (driving away demons), but mostly it was associated with the rite we witnessed in the morning in Plateia Levias (which means Lesbos Square). Today was the day when holy relics and icons were brought down in procession from the monastery by the abbot and monks (some came from a few of the churches, as well) and church members, and arranged around the square. Believers moved around the square and kissed the icons while the monks and abbot were chanting. Then they went over to an altar and did some more ceremony, and then returned to the square, where the holiest relics in the cathedral were held by monks, and believers lined up for a baptism by the abbot (he sprinkled holy water on their heads with bound branches—we don’t know what—and carnations, after which each believer kissed both the relic and (often) the hand of the holder. One of the most prized relics of the monastery is the skull of St. Thomas (that Thomas, the “doubting” Thomas), which is in a sort of silver bucket. There was another skull, and what we think is a hand, and a particular bound book, and a few other things. It took a long while for people to accomplish this (we were inches behind the abbot and the monks). After this ceremony, groups of icon holders and supporters began moving through the streets of Chora, taking icons into local houses to “bless” them for the coming year. Fireworks are part of this as they stop at each house. . ."