Holy Week Across the Islands

Holy Week on Corfu is observed across the Old Town parishes with a programme shaped by both Byzantine and Venetian influences. More than fifteen philharmonic bands accompany the Epitaphios processions on Friday evening, led by the Philharmonic Society of Corfu, founded in September 1840 with Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros — composer of the Greek national anthem — as its first artistic director. On Holy Saturday morning the relics of Saint Spyridon, the island's patron, brought to Corfu in 1456, are carried in procession, a litany kept since 1574. At eleven the bells announce the First Resurrection and the botides — large clay pots — are thrown from the Old Town balconies to break on the stone below.

The Niptir of Patmos is the Holy Thursday rite performed by the monks of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian, in which the abbot washes the feet of twelve priests in a public square of Chora. The rite is set on a raised platform where twelve priests in porphyry-and-gold vestments take their seats as the disciples and the abbot, in the place of Christ, kneels to wash their feet near eleven in the morning. The monastery was founded in 1088, when the emperor Alexios I Komnenos granted the island to the monk Christodoulos, and the Niptir is a public reenactment of the Last Supper performed in the open in almost no other place in the Orthodox world. The monastery, the Cave of the Apocalypse below it, and the whole of medieval Chora were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999.

The Epitaphios at Kamini is the Good Friday procession of the parish of Saint John, in which the flower-dressed bier is carried out of the church and into the sea, the bearers wading in so that the immersion blesses the waters. The custom has been kept every year since 1923, begun by the sponge divers of Kamini, whose boats left after the Sunday of the Holy Cross and did not return until near September. Kamini is a short walk west along the coast from the port of Hydra. The procession moves earlier in the evening than those of the main town.

The Epitaphios at Spetses is the Good Friday procession in which the four parishes of the island — Ayios Nikolaos, the Analipsis, Ayios Antonios and Ayios Ioannis — each carry their flower-dressed Epitaphios through the lanes, converging in the Dapia, the old seafront square before the Poseidonion Grand Hotel, where the biers are raised and held aloft over the crowd. The Poseidonion was built in 1914 by Sotirios Anargyros on the model of the grand hotels of the Côte d'Azur and reopened in 2009.

The Epitaphios in Mykonos Chora is the Good Friday observance of the three parishes of Mykonos Chora — the Megali Panagia, the largest church and the metropolitan seat; the Agia Kyriaki; and the Panagia Panachrantos — each carrying their flower-dressed Epitaphios through the lanes, with the town band preceding each bier. Through the afternoon and evening the moiroloi tis Panagias, the lament of the Virgin, is sung at all three churches by the Cultural and Folklore Association of Women of Mykonos. Mykonos lies within the Holy Metropolis of Syros, Tinos, Andros, Kea and Milos.

The Illumination of Pyrgos is the Good Friday custom of the castle village of Pyrgos, on the highest hill of Santorini, in which more than sixteen thousand small tin cans filled with wood shavings and paraffin are placed on the staircases, walls and rooftops along the Epitaphios route and lit at a single coordinated moment as the wooden-carved bier of the Church of the Presentation of the Virgin passes below. The custom began in the late 1970s, when Vassilis Chrysos, then president of the community, set condensed-milk tins along the northern edge of the village to light the procession's way. Pyrgos is the former capital of Santorini.