The Greek Carnival

The Patras Carnival is the largest carnival in Greece and among the major carnivals of Europe. It culminates in the weekend before Clean Monday. The final Saturday is given to the Night Parade, the podaráti, held on foot and without floats, the crews lighting their own costumes through the dark; the final Sunday, 14 March, is given to the Grand Parade, when some thirty thousand follow the Carnival King along a four-kilometre route through the centre. The carnival's lineage runs to 1829, when the first carnival dance was held in the house of the merchant Moreti, and the Municipality of Patras has organised it since 1952. It closes at the harbour on the Sunday night, when the King of Carnival is burnt over the water and the mayor declares both the close of this carnival and the opening of the next.

The Xanthi Carnival, the Thracian Folklore Festivities, is the largest carnival of northern Greece and the second in the country after Patras. It opens in mid-February and runs its weeks of concerts, folklore evenings and street revelry to a close on the Sunday before Clean Monday, 14 March. First organised in its modern form in 1966, the season moves through the old town and the squares before it gathers for the Grand Parade, a procession of carnival-club chariots some three kilometres through the centre. It closes with the burning of Tzaros, an effigy set alight by the Kosynthos river beneath fireworks, a custom brought by the Eastern Thracian refugees who settled the region after 1922.

The Rethymno Carnival is the grand carnival of Crete and among the oldest kept anywhere in Greece. It opens with the Triodion on Sunday 21 February at Mikrasiaton Square in the Venetian old town, where the Municipal Philharmonic leads the costume presentation that marks the season's start. Its lineage runs to 1914, when the first ball, parade and treasure hunt were held; its modern form took shape under the Rethymno Touring Club from the early 1960s, and since 1993 the Municipality of Rethymno has organised it. A month of serenades through the old town, the treasure hunt now in its thirties, and the Tsiknopempti grilling precede the principal spectacles, the children's and night parades and the grand seafront parade, which under this year's late Pascha fall into March.

The Carnival of Skyros, on the southernmost island of the Sporades, keeps a rite that scholars trace to Dionysian procession; Skyros is the island where Theseus was said to have died. From the opening of the Triodion on 21 February and through each weekend of the season, the Yeros comes down through the lanes of Chora: an old man in a black goatherd's cloak and thirty to forty sheep-bells, his face behind a kid's-hide mask, with the Korela dancing about him in the white Skyrian dress and the Frankos accompanying in western dress. The Municipality of Skyros carries the season to its close on the final Sunday, 14 March, when the Trata is staged in the square, a mock boat carried in whose masked crew turn the year's events to verse in the Skyrian dialect.

Genitsaroi and Boules of Naoussa is a carnival custom of the wine town of Naoussa, in the foothills of Mount Vermio, that belongs to no other place in Greece. It was inscribed on the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2020. The custom reaches its centre on Cheesefare Sunday, 14 March, and is taken up again on Clean Monday the 15th: the all-male bouloukia move through the lanes in measured pairs to the zurna and the davul, the lead Genitsaros in a white fustanella and an ornate wax mask of white, red and gold, and the Boula beside him in a flowered dress and a woman's mask. The preservation society founded in 1971 keeps the form, and beneath its spring symbolism runs the town's memory of the destruction of Naoussa in the 1822 rising of the Greek War of Independence.