The summer festival season kicked off with souvlaki and moussaka as the Greek Festival began the run of must-see events during the area's summer season.
Many of the visitors may not know much about the Greek history and culture the festival celebrates and shows off, but they know good food and drink when they see it and taste it. On a steamy Sunday, they filled the tents and ate their fill.
Chairman Jeff Gianiodis says the crowd was slightly smaller than Saturday when it was so packed it was hard to move. Gianiodis says this event was the changing of the guard for people like himself who worked on the first festival as a teenager.
"I'm the first one that had a father who chaired this. My dad chaired this about 25, almost 30 years ago," Gianiodis said.
"Now it seems like we're turning into our parents. The kids that I started with as kids are now big chairmen. It seems like we have turned into our parents. It's kind of interesting how that works."
Gianiodis says the revenue from the festival allows the congregation to run a soup kitchen for the neighborhood a couple of days a month and work with a veterans' home up the street and to start building a community center in Lancaster on land the church has purchased.
