An even more striking ceremony takes place on Saturday night. About midnight people begin to gather in the churches, which are aromatic with the flowering bay strewn on the floor. Every one carries a candle but none are lighted—not even before the icons. The service begins with antiphonal chanting. The ancient Byzantine music sounds stranger than ever in the dim light, sung by the black-robed priests with black veils over their tall black caps. Finally, the celebrant, in a purple cope of mourning, withdraws behind the _iconostásion_, the screen that in a Greek church divides the holy table from the chancel. As the chant proceeds candles are lighted in certain chandeliers. Then the door of the sanctuary is thrown open, revealing a blaze of light and colour within. The celebrant comes out in magnificent vestments, holding a lighted candle and saying: “Come to the light.” Those nearest him reach out their own tapers to take the sacred fire, and from them it is propagated in an incredibly short time through the entire church. In the meantime the priests march in procession out-of-doors, headed by a banner emblematic of the resurrection. And there, surrounded by the flickering lights of the congregation, the celebrant chants the triumphant resurrection hymn. At this point tradition demands that the populace should express their own sentiments by a volley of pistol-shots. But since the reactionary uprising of 1909, when soldiers took advantage of the Greek Easter to make such tragic use of their own arms, an attempt has been made in Constantinople to suppress this detail. I have been told that each shot is aimed at Judas. The unfaithful apostle, at all events, used to be burned in effigy on Good Friday at Therapia. And I have heard of other customs of a similar bearing.