A lot of cities have a Greek Festival, but would you believe that Fresno has the biggest?
Peter Vallis is chairman of the Fresno Greek Festival which holds its celebration Sept. 18 – 20 on the grounds of the Saint George Greek Orthodox Church on Orchard Street in Mayfair next to Radio Park. Vallis says that Fresno Greek Fest is “the biggest in California by far.”
“And we have the most fun.”
It’s one of many bold claims Vallis makes in the course of our phone call, but, at least in this case, the confirmable parts of it seem to check out. Festival organizers say they expect around 25,000 attendees over the three-day weekend. That’s more than LA, San Jose, or Santa Barbara (which claim anywhere from 15 to 20 thousand, respectively).
Either way, that’s a lot of gyros made by Vallis’s small army of 1,100 volunteers – the meat seasoned, split, spitted, and stacked, with spices imported from Greece, ready for the grill.
“You can’t buy a real gyro between LA and San Francisco. It’s even arguable if you can get one in San Francisco,” Vallis says. “You can get one in Sac, but you can’t get one between LA and San Francisco except at Greek Fest. Every one of the rest of them, they all use SPAM and it’s gross. We make our own gyro meat from the same cut of pork that they use in Greece.”
Which is to say, a mixture of pork belly and pork butt (which actually comes from the pig’s shoulder).
Food, clearly, is central to the Greek Fest pitch. This year will be Fresno Greek Fest’s 63rd, having celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Saint George Church itself in 2024. This year, Vallis notes that they’ve ordered:
- 2,000 pounds of butter
- 3,000 pounds of chicken
- 1,600 pounds of lamb
- 1,800 pounds of rice
- 2,300 pounds of tomatoes
- 750 pounds of phyllo dough
- 900 pounds of feta cheese
- 1,200 pounds of yogurt
“We’re the rare Greek festival in this country that makes all its own food anymore,” Vallis says.
Here’s what Vallis suggests that any first-time Fresno Greek Fest attendee absolutely must try:
- The moussaka
- Loukoumades
- Gyro
“Moussaka is the quintessential Greek food,” Vallis says. “The food of kings, really – eggplant and meat and bechamel – you can’t miss it. And then you’ve got to try the loukoumades, with or without the Dubai chocolate bling.”
Loukoumades are a kind of Greek doughnut made with a round puff of fried dough. The Dubai chocolate version, drawing from the recently-ubiquitous, chocolate-pistachio concoction, is new for this year.
“The Dubai-style is all the rage in Greece right now,” Vallis says. “So we’re doing loukoumades with shaved phyllo and pistachio cream and chocolate. Our people think we’re nuts, but you know what? It’s worth a try to do something kind of fun.”
Some communities do have trouble balancing these kinds of new trends from the old country with the “traditional” recipes that their immigrant forebearers taught them, even though those recipes themselves may have been full of substitutions and improvisation even then.
“When a lot of the immigrants first came, they used ingredients that you wouldn’t necessarily find in Greece because they weren’t available in the United States,” Vallis says. “However, today due to international trade, plus the fact we’re in California, our recipes are pretty much like you will get in Europe.”
“Greek food,” as we now understand it, is a widely inclusive thing, lumping together everything from your grandparents’ Depression-era hand-me-down recipes (which in some cases turn out to be thousands of years old and fully documented in writing, Vallis notes) to hyper-regional modern Greek cuisine, to food from areas of the Mediterranean that are traditionally Greek but where Greeks no longer live that are popular in Greece itself, but basically unknown to the diaspora.
All that variation could be a source of conflict, but for his part, Vallis isn’t troubled by any of those considerations. “I don’t think there’s a cultural tug of war so much as it’s a beautiful flowering,” he says.
“Because it’s an old established community, we’ve been able to accommodate newcomers to the country, whether they’ve been from Greece or other historically Orthodox countries: Bulgaria, Romania, lately the Ukraine and the Middle East,” Vallis says. “As a local community, we’ve absorbed all these wonderful people and their flavors and their cultures and they have happily embraced the cornerstone of the church community, which is the Greek culture, which is really in many ways like the lingua franca of the Orthodox world.”
Instead, Vallis, in his 19th year running the festival, does what the ancients probably did and lets himself be guided by the twin pillars of what tastes good and what he can sell.
“Most Greek households make grape leaves with meat in America,” Vallis says. “In Greece, you make both, but in Fresno we can’t sell the meat ones because we have a huge Armenian community here and everyone is used to the vegetarian ones. OK, fine. We may try the meat ones again in the future, but the market’s just not there.”
“Meanwhile, we sell quite a bit more lamb than most,” Vallis says. “A lot of other cities, they don’t touch the stuff, but people in Fresno love lamb.”
If you’re not too tired from all the eating, Greek Fest will also include some cooking demos. These may include, according to Vallis, the famous moussaka, saganaki (a flaming cheese), and some heavily spiced meatballs from Asia Minor.
To wash it all down, there will be a national rep for Squinos Mastiha (a Greek liqueur made from the sap of a kind of shrub), a Greek Fest beer from Sequoia Brewing (based on the popular Greek lager Alpha), and some Greek-centric hard seltzers (hard cherry and fig leaf flavored).
All this plus shopping, dancing, stuff for the kids, and music. It’s a Greek Fest, which are packed with food and fun stuff as a general rule, but also, it’s Fresno Greek Fest.
“I’ve heard from people all around the country, ‘Oh, you guys have quite a festival,’” Vallis says. “That’s pretty good praise coming from people from Northern and Southern California, since as we all know, Fresno gets a bad rap for whatever reason. But it’s definitely one of the things that Fresno can hang its hat on.”
All tickets are available for purchase at the gate. $8 for adults, $4 for seniors over 65 and students with ID, free for children under 12 and active military with ID. The Fest itself is cash-free. The map and schedule are online here.
