Patras Carnival

The Patras Carnival reached its climax on Sunday 2 March 2025, when the grand parade — the megali parelasi — moved through the city the day before Clean Monday closed the season. It is the largest carnival in Greece and among the oldest in Europe, traced to 1829, when the first masked ball was held in the house of a Patras merchant in the years after independence. The port’s nineteenth-century trade with Italy introduced Venetian and Italian carnival traditions to the city, and from that history grew traditions kept nowhere else — among them the Bourboulia, a masked women’s ball dating to around 1872.

The 2025 edition opened on 18 January and ran through weeks of chariots, treasure hunts and neighbourhood balls toward the finale weekend. The floats are built across the year in the municipal workshops. The season closes with the torch-lit night parade on the Saturday before Clean Monday and the grand parade on the Sunday, with tens of thousands of participants marching behind the King Carnival.