The Triodion
The Triodion opens on Sunday 21 February 2027 — the pre-Lenten weeks the Greek year gives to the carnival cycle, running to Cheesefare Sunday on 14 March before Great Lent begins on Clean Monday; Pascha falls on 2 May.
The Triodion opens on Sunday 21 February 2027 — the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, ten Sundays before Pascha, which falls on 2 May in 2027. The period takes its name from the liturgical book of three-ode canons sung from this Sunday through to Holy Saturday; its public face in Greece is the carnival cycle, the Apokries, held across the weeks before Great Lent begins on Clean Monday, 15 March.
The sequence holds its order: the Sunday of the Prodigal Son on 28 February, Meatfare Sunday on 7 March, and Cheesefare Sunday — Apokriatiki, the carnival’s culminating day — on 14 March. Tsiknopempti falls on Thursday 4 March, the day the cities smell of grilled meat from morning to night, the tradition that gives the Thursday its name.
The principal cycles run where they always have. Patras keeps the largest carnival in Greece, its grand parade taken on the final Sunday; Naoussa in Macedonia holds the Boules and Janitsaroi, the costumed bands that move through the town in procession; Xanthi in Thrace carries the most ethnographically layered of the cycles. The Triodion opens on a date that varies each year according to the Pascha calculation.