To go with our Greek meal with a load of friends at our
house for New Year’s Eve, I made this traditional Greek New Year’s cake. All over Greece it is baked every New Year’s
Eve in honour of Saint Basil whose feast day is the first of January. ‘Pita’ in Greek can mean a loaf of bread, a
pie or a cake; ‘Vasilopita’ means ‘Saint Basil’s Cake.’ Baked with a coin hidden inside it, the cake
is cut at midnight as the New Year dawns and a slice given to each member of
the family or friends at the table, in order of age from eldest to
youngest. The person who finds the coin
is said to have good luck for the new year.
The story behind it is that one year in the last half of
the fourth century, during a time of terrible famine, the emperor levied a sinfully
excessive tax upon the people of Caesarea. The tax was such a heavy burden upon
the already impoverished people that to avoid prison each family had to
relinquish its few remaining coins and pieces of jewellery, including precious
family heirlooms. Learning of this injustice upon his flock, the archbishop of
Caesarea, Saint Basil the Great, called upon the emperor to repent. The emperor agreed to cancel the tax and
instructed his tax collectors to turn over to Saint Basil all of the chests
containing the coins and jewellery which had been paid as taxes by the people
of Caesarea. But now Saint Basil was
faced with the daunting and impossible task of returning these thousands of
coins and pieces of jewellery to their rightful owners. He decided to bake all
the treasures inside a great big ‘pita’ and called all the townspeople to the
cathedral where he blessed and cut the pita, giving a piece to each person.
Miraculously, each owner received their own valuables in their slice of
Vasilopita!
