Festival Calendar
The Greek year, month by month
This calendar follows our year from January to December and sets beside each month the Attic month that roughly overlapped it. Athenian months ran from new moon to new moon, the year began after midsummer, and an extra month was slipped in now and then, so the match with ours is only approximate. Under each ancient festival we note a rural custom of the same season, still kept or well remembered in Greek villages.
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January
Attic month: Gamelion
Theogamia
In honour of: Zeus and Hera
Gamelion took its name from marriage, gamos, and Athenians thought it the right month for weddings. Late in the month the Theogamia remembered the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, with Hera honoured as the goddess of wedlock. Earlier, the Lenaia brought comic and tragic contests to Dionysus in the depth of winter, when rough seas kept foreign visitors away and, as a character in Aristophanes points out, the city had its jokes to itself.
In the village
On New Year’s Day a pomegranate is smashed on the doorstep for plenty, and the household watches who first crosses the threshold, the podariko, for the year’s luck. The vasilopita is cut with a coin baked inside. On 6 January the waters are blessed, and the kallikantzaroi are said to flee back underground.
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February
Attic month: Anthesterion
Anthesteria
In honour of: Dionysus
The month of flowers held the Anthesteria, a three-day feast of new wine. On Jar-Opening the autumn’s wine was broached and offered at the shrine of Dionysus in the Marshes; on Jugs, every drinker, small children included, had a jug of their own; on Pots, a dish of boiled mixed seeds was set out for Hermes of the underworld, and the wandering spirits were sent on their way. The Lesser Mysteries at Agrai also fell in this month.
In the village
Carnival weeks, the Apokries, often fall now. In some villages of Thrace and Macedonia masked men play the Kalogeros, with a mock plowing and a pretend death; on Skyros, dancers hung with goat bells shake the lanes. Clean Monday ends the feasting with kites, flatbread and the start of Lent.
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March
Attic month: Elaphebolion
City Dionysia
In honour of: Dionysus Eleuthereus
With sailing weather back, Athens held its greatest show. The old wooden image of Dionysus Eleuthereus, said to have come from Eleutherae on the border with Boeotia, was escorted to the theatre, and for several days the city watched tragedies, satyr plays and comedies in his honour. The month itself was named for Artemis the deer-shooter, whose festival, the Elaphebolia, was remembered for cakes shaped like stags.
In the village
On 1 March children tie on the martis, a twist of red and white thread, so the spring sun will not burn them. They wear it until the first swallows appear, then leave it on a branch for the birds. Children’s swallow songs, sung door to door, are older still: one from Rhodes survives from antiquity.
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April
Attic month: Mounichion
Mounichia
In honour of: Artemis Mounichia
At the full moon of Mounichion, Athenians honoured Artemis at her shrine on the Mounichia hill above the harbour of Piraeus. Worshippers carried round cakes ringed with small lit torches, the amphiphontes, a gift of light for the goddess of wild things and of girls on the threshold of marriage. Plutarch says the day was also kept for the victory at Salamis, which the goddess had lit with a full moon.
In the village
Easter often falls now: eggs are dyed red on Holy Thursday and cracked against one another after the midnight service, and lambs turn on spits on Sunday. Saint George’s day, 23 April, honours a patron of shepherds and opens the pastoral summer, when flocks start the climb to the hills.
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May
Attic month: Thargelion
Thargelia
In honour of: Apollo and Artemis
The Thargelia marked the birthdays of Artemis and Apollo and the ripening of the first grain. A pot of first fruits cooked from the new harvest, the thargelos, was offered to the god. Before it, the city was purified: two people chosen as pharmakoi, scapegoats, were led out of Athens. How harsh this rite was in practice, the ancient sources do not agree.
In the village
On May Day families gather wildflowers and weave the Maios, a wreath hung on the front door, sometimes with ears of green wheat or a head of garlic tucked in against the evil eye. It stays there drying until midsummer, when it goes into the Saint John’s fires.
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June
Attic month: Skirophorion
Dipolieia and Bouphonia
In honour of: Zeus Polieus
At threshing time, the Dipolieia on the Acropolis ended in the strange ‘ox-murder’. Grain was laid on the altar of Zeus and oxen driven round it; the first to eat was struck down. Then each person present blamed another, until the blade alone was found guilty and, in Porphyry’s account, thrown into the sea; Pausanias calls it an axe and says it was tried in court. The same month brought the Skira, a women’s festival of Demeter.
In the village
On the eve of Saint John, 23 June, villagers jump over bonfires and burn the dried May wreaths. Girls draw ‘unspoken water’ in silence and drop tokens into a jar left out under the stars; next day, at the Klidonas, the tokens are drawn out to rhymes that foretell marriages.
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July
Attic month: Hekatombaion
Panathenaia
In honour of: Athena
The Attic year opened with the first new moon after midsummer, and its first month built to Athena’s great feast. The festival brought a new robe for her olive-wood image, and every fourth year the Great Panathenaia added games whose prizes were painted amphorae of oil from her sacred olive trees: an olive grove paid for the athletes’ glory. Earlier in the month, the Kronia let slaves feast beside their masters as the harvest came in.
In the village
On 20 July the Prophet Elias is honoured at chapels on hilltops and peaks across Greece, a fitting perch for the saint who rose to heaven in a fiery chariot. In older days, the threshing floors below were still busy with the last of the wheat.
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August
Attic month: Metageitnion
Karneia
In honour of: Apollo Karneios
The Athenian month is thin on known festivals, so we cross to Sparta, whose Karneia fell at this season. For nine days the Dorians honoured Apollo Karneios with feasting in shelters set up like a camp and a race in which young men chased a runner decked with garlands. The holy truce was strict: Herodotus says the Karneia kept the main Spartan army at home when Leonidas marched to Thermopylae.
In the village
On 15 August the Dormition of the Virgin is the high feast of summer, with village panigyria, dancing in the square and pilgrims crowding to Tinos. Older farmers watched the first twelve days of the month, the merominia, reading in each day’s weather a forecast for one month of the coming year.
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September
Attic month: Boedromion
Greater Mysteries
In honour of: Demeter and Kore
In Boedromion the initiates gathered in Athens, bathed in the sea with piglets for purification and walked the Sacred Way to Eleusis behind the image of Iakchos. At the bridge over the Kephisos, masked jokers mocked the marchers, as Iambe once made grieving Demeter laugh. What was shown inside the Telesterion stayed secret, and the few ancient writers who hint at it do not agree.
In the village
September is vintage month: grapes are trodden in the patitiri and the must is boiled down into petimezi syrup. On 14 September, the Exaltation of the Cross, farmers in many villages take seed for the coming sowing to church to be blessed.
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October
Attic month: Pyanepsion
Thesmophoria
In honour of: Demeter Thesmophoros
With sowing at hand, the married women of Athens spent three days at Demeter’s sanctuary: the Going Up, the Fast and the day of Fair Birth. A late commentary tells of piglets thrown into pits and their remains brought up to be mixed with the seed. Earlier that month the Pyanepsia offered Apollo a stew of beans and the eiresione, an olive bough wound with wool and hung with figs and loaves.
In the village
On 26 October, the feast of Saint Demetrius, many districts taste the new wine, and shepherds bring their flocks down to winter pasture. A spell of warm days around his feast is called Saint Demetrius’s little summer, and sowing begins in earnest.
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November
Attic month: Maimakterion
Maimakteria
In honour of: Zeus Maimaktes
Little is known of this month’s rites. Its name honours Zeus Maimaktes, the ‘blusterer’ of autumn storms, and later lexicographers mention a festival, the Maimakteria, perhaps meant to calm him so that he would send gentle weather to the new-sown fields. We include it as a reminder of how much of the farmer’s year survives only as a name.
In the village
Olive picking begins, with nets spread beneath the trees and branches beaten with long poles. On 21 November the Virgin is honoured as Mesosporitissa, ‘of the mid-sowing’, and women take polysporia, a boiled mixture of grains and pulses, to church to be blessed for a good harvest.
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December
Attic month: Poseideon
Rural Dionysia
In honour of: Dionysus
Each Attic village chose its own day in Poseideon for the Rural Dionysia. A household procession carried a basket of offerings and a phallus pole, as Aristophanes shows in his Acharnians, and larger communities such as Piraeus and Ikarion staged plays. In the same month the women of Eleusis kept the Haloa, named for the threshing floor, in honour of Demeter and Dionysus, while the fields lay sown and waiting.
In the village
Before Christmas, families slaughter the household pig and bake the Christopsomo, a bread marked with a cross. Children go round singing the kalanda, and the kallikantzaroi, mischievous goblins, are said to climb up from under the earth for the twelve days until Epiphany.