The Feast of Saint Spyridon at Corfu
On 12 December Corfu keeps the feast of Saint Spyridon, its patron, at the church built for his relic in 1589, where the relic is set upright at the door of the shrine for days of round-the-clock veneration.
On 12 December Corfu keeps the feast of Saint Spyridon, its patron — a fourth-century bishop of Cyprus whose incorrupt relic has rested on the island since 1456. The Church of Saint Spyridon was raised in 1589 in the Heptanesian basilica form by the Corfiot Voulgaris family, into whose keeping the saint had passed, and the relic has been kept there since. The 2025 observance opened on 11 December with the Service of Supplication sung by Metropolitan Nektarios of Corfu, Paxoi and the Diapontian Islands at the holy shrine.
For the feast the relic is taken from its silver reliquary, made in Vienna in 1867, and set upright at the entrance of the shrine, where the church remains open for veneration through the feast days. The four great litanies of Corfu, in which the saint is carried upright through the lanes of the old town, fall on other dates: Palm Sunday, Holy Saturday, 11 August and the first Sunday of November.