Greek Wedding Traditions

Greek island weddings, have always been a huge event that all the villagers look forward to. A chance to show your family’s wealth, power and love for the family, until today in some parts of Greece it is considered the norm to build or give your daughter a house as part of her dowry.

A typical Greek wedding can have anything form 200-1500 guests in attendance and will usually follow with a reception for at least half of these! The reception will have a live Greek band playing traditional songs, plenty of food and of course free flowing Greek wine.

The Thursday before the wedding (always on a weekend), there is a gathering at the couples new home to “make the bed”.

Family and friends gather and all the unmarried friends of the bride, make the couples bed, this is accompanied by a live band and a church blessing. It is tradition for people to throw money on the bed for the couple and also seta babies on it to signify fertility for the couple.

That evening each family have their own dinner party, and if the groom comes to see the bride, her mother must douse him in flour.

On the day of the wedding, the best woman will shave the groom and his single friends will dress him.

Over at the bride’s house, the best woman must give the bride’s parents gifts in order to enter the house. As her father puts her shoe on she will attempt to persuade him in to giving her more and more money.

After the wedding, the bride and groom go to their new house where the mother of the bride feeds the groom honey to signify keeping him sweet towards her daughter!

A few of the more traditions are:

• After the reception the groom used to fry his tie and the bride, groom and the parents had to eat some of it.
• The bride writes all her single girlfriends names under her shoe in pen, whichever name is legible at the end of the evening is the next in line to marry.
• During a Greek Orthodox Wedding, there's a tradition for male relatives of the bride to slap the groom on the back, sometimes with force, as a way of welcoming the groom into the family.
• A Greek bride carries a lump of sugar in her glove on wedding day for a "sweet" life
• Crowns are placed on the couples' heads; the crowns are usually white or gold or made of orange blossoms or twigs and vine wrapped in silver and gold paper. A ribbon attaches them, and they are switched on the bride's and groom's heads three times. The crowns symbolize that the marriage is noble, and that the couple is becoming a unit, a family.