Greece’s festival year turns on Orthodox Easter — weeks of carnival in Patras, kites on Clean Monday, epitaph processions and flying clay pots in Corfu, and a rocket war between two churches on Chios.
Photo: Βασίλης Παπαιωάννου, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Most of Greece’s great festivals follow Orthodox Easter, which is calculated with the Julian calendar and usually falls later than Western Easter; the two coincide in some years, such as 2025 and 2028. Carnival builds for weeks before Lent, Clean Monday opens Lent seven weeks before Easter, and Holy Week ends in the midnight Resurrection service, greeted with bells and fireworks.
The customs in this atlas show how local history has shaped the same feast: the Venetian legacy of Easter in Corfu, and the fierce parish rivalry of the rocket war on Chios.
Πατρινό Καρναβάλι
Greece’s largest carnival opens on St Anthony’s Day and builds for weeks — balls, a city-wide treasure hunt, a night parade — to a Sunday procession of satirical floats and tens of thousands of costumed revellers, ending with the burning of the Carnival King in the harbour.
January 17, 2027Calculated
Καθαρά Δευτέρα
The first day of Orthodox Lent is a public holiday in Greece, spent outdoors — families head out of town to fly kites, and share shellfish, fasting dishes and lagana, a flatbread baked only on this day.
March 15, 2027Calculated
Πάσχα στην Κέρκυρα
Corfu celebrates Orthodox Easter with customs found nowhere else in Greece — brass bands playing funeral marches behind 33 epitaphs on Holy Friday, and on Holy Saturday morning a storm of clay pots flung from balconies, shattering in the streets to chase away bad luck.
April 30 – May 1, 2027Calculated
Ρουκετοπόλεμος
On the island of Chios, two rival parishes on facing hilltops mark Orthodox Easter night by firing tens of thousands of homemade rockets at each other’s church belfries — a “war” that neither side ever admits to losing.
May 1, 2027Calculated