Historic church changing checkout procedure, adding new menu items for annual Greek Festival this weekend
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POCATELLO – A festival celebrating Greek food and culture will return with some elements added for the first time this year.
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church in Pocatello is holding its annual Greek Festival from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. on Saturday. The festival, which has continued to attract thousands of people to the courtyard of the historic church year after year, will introduce some new menu items and checkout procedures to speed up the lines.
Adding the barcodes is the church’s newest measure to speed up the pace of the long lines leading to the festival, which often extend blocks away from the church. All that volunteers will have to do to charge for a pastry, which they’ve pre-packaged, is scan the item.
“All that the cashier has to do is zap it and put it into the iPad, so it’ll go a lot faster than trying to add things up and press buttons,” Zozos explained. “The barcodes are going to be very helpful.”
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The church has added pictures of the menu items to the cash registers for the food line, making it faster for volunteers to charge attendees for their food. In addition, some volunteers will be designated baggers so that people won’t have to bag up their food.
There will be at least four registers for the two food lines and two registers for the pastries. Zozos hopes these additions will shorten the time attendees wait to start eating Greek food.
“We want to make sure that people are going through as quickly as possible,” Zozos said.
Two new items will be added to the menu this year. One will be “pork shish kebab on the grill, marinated, with a few pita breads,” and the other will be baklava sundaes with ice cream provided by Scoops N Sliders.
“It’s the best. It’s homemade, and he donates all the ice cream,” Zozos said.
Zozos invited EastIdahoNews.com to one of the church’s sessions, where volunteers prepare food for the festival. On Aug. 9, they were working to prepare Koulourakia, which are traditional Greek butter cookies.
While people come to the festival for the Greek food, Zozos said it offers attendees a window into something many people are missing.
“This (church) is a community,” Zozos said.
Volunteers from the parish begin preparing for the annual festival around four months in advance. The effort is spearheaded by the parish’s Ladies Philoptochos Society, which translates to ‘friends of the poor.’
While many of the society’s members have decades of experience and descend from other members, the majority of the volunteers are new converts to the church.
Rather than lose members, Zozos said the church has added members in recent years.
“In the past four or five years, there’s (been) an explosion of people coming to Orthodoxy here in Pocatello,” Zozos said.
Pocatello’s parish, which has practiced in the same building since 1915, now has around 200 members attending every Sunday service, Zozos said. Only around a tenth of them are of Greek descent.
“They’re seeking a stabilized faith that does not change, and that’s what brings them to Orthodoxy,” Zozos explained.
