By Jason Tait
Staff Writer
METHUEN -- Maria Karamourtopoulos is nervous about two things this weekend -- hanging by a rope three stories over North Street in Boston, and being watched by thousands of people.
But she is honored to do it. After all, it is a family tradition. Her mother, Mary Karamourtopoulos, did it 31 years ago and her grandmother, Angela DeGrandis, did the same five decades ago.
Maria, a 9-year-old Comprehensive Grammar School student, will be the "flying angel" at the 94th annual Fishermen's Feast in Boston's North End -- a Catholic religious tradition started in a Sicilian fishing village 500 years ago.
Dressed like an angel, Maria will be secured to a rope and lowered out of a third-story window. Tied to a pulley, she will descend toward an elaborately decorated statue of the Madonna del Soccorso, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, who is said to care for fishermen.
Maria will say a prayer and will be lifted back to the window while people cheer and throw confetti.
"I feel proud," Maria said. "It feels good to be the angel. I'm just scared to fly out a window on a rope."
The "Flight of the Angel," the pinnacle of the four-day feast, will occur at about 7 p.m. Sunday. The festival starts tonight.
The origins of the Fishermen's Feast date back to the 12th century in the Sicilian village of Sciacca, when an ill monk with a broken neck claimed that a woman came to him saying she was Madonna del Soccorso. She said she came to help the people of Sciacca, and healed him.
The vision became legend, and other villagers claimed to have been helped by the Madonna.
In 1492, the villagers commissioned a statue of the Virgin Mary, which was completed in Palermo in 1503 but was made of solid marble and could not be moved by conventional means to Sciacca. So the town's fishermen gathered their boats and took it by sea, then carried it from the docks into the village.
Since then, when the statute was paraded through the village, only the town's fishermen were allowed to carry it.
Some of Sciacca's fishermen immigrated to Boston about 100 years ago, bringing the tradition of parading a statue of Madonna del Soccorso with them.
The North End's first Fishermen's Feast was in 1911, and is said to be the neighborhood's longest-running ethnic festival. Maria's great-great grandfather come from Sciacca and was one of the Boston festival's founders.
The festival is special, says Mary Karamourtopoulos, because it has lasted so long in an era when traditions seem to wither away.
"The city has changed over the years, but this has stayed the same," she said. "Hopefully in 30 years, I'll be watching my granddaughters fly."