The santorini carnival, or Apokries in Greek, is the three-week run-up to Orthodox Lent, ending on Clean Monday seven weeks before Orthodox Easter, so usually between early February and mid-March. Village parades, school fancy dress, tsikna smoke over Fira on Smoky Thursday, and a kite-flying picnic on Clean Monday that half the island turns out for. It is free, entirely local, and it falls in the cheapest and emptiest weeks of the year.

Carnival season in Greece is an important holiday period that leading up to the Orthodox Easter Sunday! This year the celebrations start from 9th February until 1st of March the first day of Lent. So in total a celebration of twenty-two days, including 3 weekends, there are many private parties, parades and public events organized by municipalities and schools all over Greece. Book a Santorini Tours and spent the carnival season on the best island in Greece!

How Carnival weeks named and what you can eat?

The Greek carnival season is divided in 3 weeks and all the Greeks are preparing for the Lent with great festivals and parties. The first week opens the carnival and it is named Profoni, because everyone is shouting that the carnival season begins. The second week it is named Kreatini, because you can eat meat every day and the third week is called Tirini, because you only eat dairy products and fish.

Of course Carnival is a feast of great parties that takes place all over the country with masquerades, dancing and music. The name ‘Apokries’ means avoidance from meat because, after that, the period of Easter Lent begins, where there is no meat consumed for 40 days.

What is Tsiknopempti and how can you celebrate it in Greece?

On the second week of Carnival and on Thursday, Greeks celebrate the so called “Tsiknopempti”. On this particular day everyone grills and eats meat. The smell of grilled meat, which fills every neighbourhood, is called “tsikna”! Most Greeks gather with friends and family, in order to feast! This means, they will eat meat, smell the “tsikna”, drink and dance until late at night!

Where the Carnival take place in Santorini?

The unique aspect of Carnival is wearing costumes and masks. This festival, dates back to the period of Dionysos, the ancient Greek god of wine and theatre. The greatest Carnival that takes place in Patra. However, there are many other’s cities like Xanthi, Santorini, Naxos, Mytilini, Thessaloniki, and Athens that celebrate equally.

The carnival customs of Santorini  differ from the rest of Greece. Something like that happens with everything on the island. We may not find similar customs, but the carnival in Fira Square is still here and fills the island with fun, dance and smiles, a sight worth watching and living. You can take a tour of Santorini!

What are the carnival customs of Santorini?

In the past, from the feast of St. Anthony to the Sunday of Tirini and the beginning of the Triodion, children and adults dressed in funny costumes and visited the various houses in the evenings. As soon as they got out of the door the masquerades shouted: “Can the masquerades get inside? And the master of the house replied, “Get in. Get in”

On the afternoon of the Carnival everybody is dressed up and change their voices according to the costume they wear. Because they couldn’t reveal their faces they had to play a short role in a story, only they know and the party begins. Book a Santorini Sunset Wine Tour, a Santorini Private Tour or a Santorini Popular Destination Tour and enjoy your stay there without wondering where to start from.

What is Clean Monday?

The name might sound weird but really, it is not that Greeks clean up their homes on this day. The Clean Monday is always placed every year 7 weeks before the Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday. This is an usual moveable feast that will introduce you to the Greek traditions and customs and make you feel like a local! The carnival ends this day and the Lent begins. On Kathara Deftera most of the Greeks leave the big cities and visit the countryside with friends and families to have a picnic and fly a kite.

Kathara Deftera (Clean Monday) is a day of joy and more tranquil celebrations. As in the rest of Greece, locals head for the nearby beach in the morning, where they fly colourful kites to the sky. At noon, they gather in the village centre to share the traditional meal of the day: “lagana” (traditional flatbread, originally prepared without yeast), “taramosalata” (Greek caviar paste), seafood, beans and other fasting delicacies.

How can you built a kite?

Making a kite is not as hard as it seems. Here’s the material you will need.

• A rectangular piece of paper – A4 is good. Feel free to decorate it, either now or in step two.
• String.
• A paper hole punch.

Fold paper in half widthways. Bring the two short sides of your piece of paper together and press along the bend to make a crease. Now is a great time to decorate your kite! Use pens, pencils, crayons, felt-tip pens, a printer, but be careful not to weigh it down too much. If it’s too heavy it won’t be able to fly!

Bend the front corner of the top layer down to touch the crease. Repeat on the back layer and staple.The essential thing with this step is to only bend the corners down. If you fold them, the kite will not work. The exact position of the corner is not critical, but will affect how your kite flies. If you don’t have access to a functional stapler and staples, you can pierce through the two corners and the body of the kite with your hole making device.

Thread string through the hole and tie it off. The knot used is not important as long as it will keep the string attached to the kite. Find somewhere with a steady breeze free from things that could get in the way. Release your kite with one hand while holding the string in the other. Your kite should take off! Enjoy!

See more about Santorini Private Tours 2020:

• How to spend a winter tasting weekend in Santorini!
• 5 reasons to go to Santorini in October
• Santorini Summer 2019
• Top 10 Restaurants in Santorini
• Santorini: A Great Gastronomic World
• Book a Santorini Private Tour to take the Most Memorable Photos in Instagram!

Santorini Carnival: The Short Answer

The santorini carnival — Apokries in Greek — is the three-week run-up to Orthodox Lent, ending with Clean Monday. It is a local festival rather than a tourist event: village parades, fancy dress in the schools, tsikna smoke over Fira on Smoky Thursday, and a kite-flying picnic on Clean Monday that half the island turns out for.

Eight points cover almost everything people ask about the santorini carnival.

When. Movable, tied to Orthodox Easter. Usually somewhere between early February and mid-March, and it always ends on Clean Monday, seven weeks before Easter Sunday.

How long. Three weeks: Profani or Prophonia week, Meatfare week, and Cheesefare week.

The big days of the santorini carnival. Tsiknopempti, or Smoky Thursday, in the second week; the final Sunday of parades; and Clean Monday, which closes the whole thing.

Where. Fira for the main parade, and the villages — Emporio, Pyrgos, Megalochori, Karterados — for the parts that feel oldest.

What it costs. Nothing. Everything is street-level and free.

Who the santorini carnival is for. Anybody who wants Greece rather than a resort, and who does not mind a cold sea and a half-closed island.

The catch. It falls in the deepest part of the off season. Most of Oia is shut, direct flights do not exist, and the weather is a lottery.

What the Santorini Carnival Actually Is

The Greek carnival season is older than the Christian calendar it now sits inside, and understanding that explains most of what you will see.

Apokries means, literally, “away from meat” — the period of feasting and licence before the fasting of Lent. The three weeks are structured: the first is Profani, when the season is announced and the first fancy dress appears; the second is Kreatini, Meatfare week, whose Thursday is the great meat-eating day; the third is Tyrini, Cheesefare week, when meat has stopped and dairy is still permitted. Then Clean Monday, and seven weeks of fasting.

Underneath that Christian frame sits something considerably older. The masking, the transgressive costumes, the bells, the mock weddings and the ritual mockery of authority are pre-Christian — Dionysian festivals of exactly this kind ran in the Aegean for centuries before the Orthodox calendar absorbed them. On some Greek islands the connection is unmistakable: bell-wearers, phallic props and satirical processions that the church has periodically tried and failed to suppress.

The santorini carnival is a gentler version of that. It is a family and village festival rather than the enormous street party of Patras, or the archaic, slightly unsettling rituals of Skyros and Naoussa. What it offers instead is scale: on an island of 15,500 people, in February, you are not a spectator at a carnival. You are simply there while it happens.

Tsiknopempti: Smoky Thursday

The single best day of the santorini carnival, and the one to plan a trip around if you can only be here for one of them.

Tsiknopempti — from tsikna, the smell of meat grilling over charcoal — falls on the Thursday of the second carnival week, eleven days before Clean Monday. It is the last great meat day before Lent, and the whole country grills. On Santorini that means every taverna in Fira firing up outside, souvlaki and chops going on charcoal from lunchtime, tables spilling into the street, and a smell that hangs over the town all afternoon.

What happens practically: tavernas fill from about one o’clock and stay full. Groups book long tables and stay for hours. Wine goes round, music starts, and by evening a good number of places have people dancing between the tables. Fancy dress appears — not everywhere, and enough that you notice.

Where to go: Fira has the concentration, and the villages have the character. Karterados, Messaria, Pyrgos and Emporio all keep something on, and in the smaller places you will be the only visitor in the room. Book a table in Fira; do not bother in the villages, where turning up and asking works better.

What to eat: everything grilled. Souvlaki, paidakia, loukaniko, kokoretsi if it is on. This is not the day for fava and a salad.

One practical note. Tsiknopempti is a Thursday and it is a working day for most of the island, so the eating starts at lunch and runs into the evening rather than beginning late. Arrive at two rather than nine.

The Parades and the Final Sunday

The visible spine of the santorini carnival is a sequence of parades that build across the three weeks and peak on the last Sunday before Clean Monday.

Seven notes on the parades that form the spine of the santorini carnival.

The school parades. The largest participation of the whole season. Every school on the island turns out in costume, and the numbers are considerable relative to the island’s population. Parents, grandparents and half the village line the route.

Fira. The main parade, through the town, with floats built by local clubs and associations. Satirical rather than spectacular — the floats mock local politics, island issues and whatever has been in the news.

The village parades. Emporio, Pyrgos, Megalochori, Karterados and Vothonas all hold their own. Smaller, older, and considerably more interesting if you want to see the thing rather than photograph it.

Costume at the santorini carnival. Everyone dresses up, including adults. If you are here for the final weekend, buy something. Turning up in ordinary clothes marks you out more than any costume would.

Music and dancing. Village halls, club rooms and squares, running late into the night on the final Saturday and Sunday.

Timing. Santorini carnival parades are afternoon events, typically starting between eleven and one. Nothing here starts on time.

Finding out what is on. The municipality publishes a programme a week or two ahead, and posters go up in Fira. There is no reliable schedule further out than that, which is the single most frustrating thing about planning around it.

Clean Monday and the Kites

Kathara Deftera — Clean Monday — closes the santorini carnival and opens Lent, and it is a public holiday across Greece. It is also, unexpectedly, the best day of the season to be on this island.

The tradition is a picnic outdoors, with Lenten food, and kite flying. Both are taken seriously. Families drive out to open ground — the fields around the south, the ridges near Pyrgos and Profitis Ilias, the beaches at Perissa and Kamari, the flat land near Monolithos — and spend the whole day there. The sky fills with kites, which in the wind that this island gets in February is a genuinely impressive sight.

The food is specific and worth knowing about, because Clean Monday marks the start of a strict fast. No meat, no dairy, no eggs, and no fish with blood — which leaves shellfish, octopus, squid and everything from the vegetable garden. So: lagana, a flat unleavened bread baked only on this one day; taramosalata; olives; pickled vegetables; octopus grilled or in vinegar; squid; skordalia; halva for dessert. On Santorini, fava is inevitably on the table.

What this means for a visitor is that Clean Monday is one of the few days in the Greek year when eating well is easy, cheap and entirely traditional — and one of the few days when you can watch an entire island doing the same thing at the same time. Tavernas that open at all will be full of families. Shops close. Nothing else happens.

Practical points for the last day of the santorini carnival. Buy a kite in Fira in the days before; they appear in every shop. Expect wind, and expect it to be cold. Bring layers. And do not plan anything else for that day, because the island is closed.

When the Santorini Carnival Falls

The dates move by up to a month between years, which is the first thing to establish before booking anything.

Orthodox Easter is calculated from the Julian calendar and the paschal full moon, and it rarely coincides with Western Easter. Everything in the carnival season counts backwards from it: Clean Monday is exactly seven weeks before Easter Sunday, and the santorini carnival runs for the three weeks before that.

Seven dates to work out before booking a santorini carnival trip.

The practical range. Clean Monday can fall anywhere from mid-February to mid-March. The carnival season therefore starts somewhere between late January and mid-February.

Tsiknopempti. Eleven days before Clean Monday, always a Thursday.

The final weekend. The Saturday and Sunday immediately before Clean Monday, when the parades peak.

What this means for booking. Check the Orthodox Easter date for your specific year first, count back seven weeks to Clean Monday, and build the trip around the four days ending on it.

The ideal santorini carnival window. Arrive on the Wednesday before Clean Monday, catch the final weekend of parades, and stay through the Monday itself. Four nights.

The alternative window. The Tsiknopempti weekend, which is a week earlier and quieter.

What not to do. Book a February trip and hope. In some years the whole season is over before the middle of the month.

The Island in Carnival Season

This is the honest part. The santorini carnival falls in the deepest part of the off season, and the island in February is not the island in the photographs.

Eight things about the island during the santorini carnival, stated plainly.

Weather. 12 to 16 degrees by day, 8 to 11 at night. Six to nine wet days a month, arriving as fronts with real wind behind them. Occasional storms across the caldera, which are spectacular and disruptive in equal measure.

The sea. 15 to 16 degrees. Its coldest point of the year. Nobody swims.

Daylight. Sunset between six and half past six, moving later through the season.

What is open. Fira, all of it, all year: supermarkets, bakeries, pharmacies, banks, restaurants and bars. Akrotiri, Ancient Thera and both museums in Fira on winter hours. The cable car, reduced. A handful of wineries.

What is closed. Most of Oia. Almost all of Imerovigli. The entire beach strip at Kamari, Perissa and Perivolos. Most boat operators.

Getting there. No direct European flights. Athens connects year-round, several times a day, forty-five minutes. Conventional ferries from Piraeus run on a reduced winter timetable and the fast catamarans mostly do not.

Prices. The santorini carnival falls in the cheapest weeks of the year. Caldera-view rooms at 70 to 130 euros where August asks 500 to 900, and standard doubles in Fira from 40.

Where to stay for the santorini carnival. Fira. Not a debate — it is the only part of the island with genuine winter life, and it is where the carnival happens.

What Else to Do That Week

A carnival trip needs the days around the parades filled, and February on this island has more to offer than most visitors assume.

Nine things to fill the days around the santorini carnival programme.

Akrotiri in silence. The Bronze Age town under its roof, with entire rooms to yourself. Better now than at any other time of year.

The Museum of Prehistoric Thera. The frescoes from Akrotiri, indoors, and the correct answer to a wet afternoon.

The Archaeological Museum of Thera. Also in Fira, also open all winter.

The caldera path. Oia to Fira in 14 degrees with a green landscape underneath and nobody on it. The best walking conditions of the year.

Pyrgos and Emporio. The two best inland villages, at their most themselves in February, and both central to the carnival programme.

A winery. Reduced hours, no queue, and the vines being pruned in the fields.

Ancient Thera. Open, weather permitting, with storms moving across the whole southern half of the island.

The green island. Winter rain on volcanic soil produces six weeks of deep green across the terraces and the vineyards. It appears in almost no photograph of Santorini, and February is when it starts.

Eat like a local. Winter menus in Fira: fava, slow-cooked lamb, wild greens, and prices that bear no relation to July.

Santorini Carnival Costumes and What They Mean

Fancy dress is not decoration in a Greek carnival. It is the mechanism of the whole thing, and knowing what you are looking at makes the santorini carnival considerably more interesting than a parade of children in costume.

The Greek word is maskarema, and the point of it is inversion. For three weeks the ordinary social order is suspended: a mask allows anybody to say anything to anybody, and the tradition of teasing, mocking and impersonating — particularly authority — is protected by anonymity. In villages where everybody knows everybody, that matters. It is the same logic that produced the satirical floats, which on this island are aimed squarely at local politics, the tourism industry and whatever has annoyed the island that year.

What you will see falls into a few broad groups. Children dress as more or less anything, and school parades are the biggest participation of the season. Adults tend towards either the elaborate — full period or fantasy costume, made or hired — or the deliberately absurd, which is the older tradition. Cross-dressing is common and entirely unremarkable, and it is one of the oldest elements of the festival. Groups from village clubs often dress to a single theme and build a float to match.

The one thing that stands out on Santorini, relative to the mainland carnivals, is how much of it is family-organised. There is no professional carnival industry here. The floats are built in garages, the costumes are made at home or borrowed, and the music is whoever in the village plays. That is precisely what makes it worth watching.

If you are here for the final weekend, buy something. Costume shops appear in Fira for the season and every supermarket carries masks, wigs and hats. Turning up to a village parade in ordinary clothes marks you as a spectator; turning up in a bad wig marks you as a participant, and the difference in how the evening goes is substantial.

Where the Santorini Carnival Traditions Come From

The santorini carnival sits at the end of a very long line, and its individual elements have traceable origins that are worth knowing.

The masking. Almost certainly Dionysian in origin. Festivals of Dionysus involved masks, wine, licensed disorder and processions, and they ran across the Aegean for centuries. The Orthodox church absorbed the timing rather than the content, and the content survived largely intact.

The three-week structure. Byzantine. The graduated fast — meat, then dairy, then nothing — is a formal part of the Orthodox calendar and the carnival weeks are named after it: Meatfare and Cheesefare.

The satire. Medieval and Venetian. The Cyclades were under Venetian rule for three centuries after 1204, and the tradition of ridiculing authority in costume travelled with it.

Tsiknopempti. Practical rather than religious in origin. Meat had to be used before the fast, and grilling it outdoors is what a whole community does at the same time.

The kites on Clean Monday. The usual explanation is the soul rising towards God at the start of Lent. The unromantic explanation is that late February and early March are the windiest weeks of the Greek year and everybody is outdoors anyway.

Lagana. Unleavened bread, connected to the same symbolism of stripping things back that governs the whole Lenten fast. It is baked on one day a year.

The kites and the food together. Clean Monday is the only day in the Greek calendar on which an entire country picnics outdoors simultaneously, and it is the most visible surviving example of a communal seasonal ritual anywhere in Europe.

Photographing the Santorini Carnival

Eight notes on photographing the santorini carnival.

The light. February and March give the best light of the year here — low sun, real cloud and storm structure over the caldera. Nothing in August comes close.

Ask first. Children in costume are the heart of the santorini carnival and photographing them without asking a parent is not acceptable. A greeting first changes the answer almost every time.

Village over town. The Fira parade photographs like a parade. Emporio and Pyrgos photograph like something older.

Go wide. The lanes are narrow, the villages are stacked and the crowds are close.

Shoot the evening. Village halls and squares after dark, with a fast lens, are where the atmosphere is.

Clean Monday from above. A ridge above the picnic grounds, with kites in the air and the caldera behind. The single best photograph of the season.

Bring a waterproof for the camera. Fronts come through fast and hard in February.

The empty island as a bonus. Oia, Imerovigli and the caldera path in carnival season are as empty as they will ever be, and the green landscape underneath them is gone by June.

Carnival Food, Week by Week

The three weeks of the santorini carnival are organised around what you are allowed to eat, and following that is the easiest way to understand the season.

The santorini carnival is organised around what you are allowed to eat, week by week.

Week one, Profani. Nothing is restricted. The season is announced, the first costumes appear in the schools, and the eating is ordinary.

Week two, Kreatini or Meatfare. The great meat week, ending on the Sunday of Meatfare, which is the last day meat is permitted before Lent. Tsiknopempti falls on the Thursday, and the whole island grills.

Week three, Tyrini or Cheesefare. No meat. Dairy, eggs and fish are still allowed, so the week runs on cheese pies, omelettes, macaroni with cheese, and everything that uses up what is in the house before the fast.

Clean Monday, the end of the santorini carnival. The fast begins. No meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish with blood. Shellfish, octopus, squid, vegetables and pulses are permitted, which is why the Clean Monday table looks the way it does.

The santorini carnival additions. Fava with onion and capers, tomatokeftedes, white aubergine, chloro cheese in the cheese week and none of it on the Monday, and local capers and caper leaves throughout.

Lagana. The flat unleavened bread baked in Greece on one day a year, Clean Monday, and available in every bakery in Fira that morning.

Halva. The traditional Clean Monday dessert, since it contains no dairy or eggs.

What to drink. Local assyrtiko, which is on every table on the island whatever the calendar says.

Carnival Elsewhere in Greece, for Comparison

It is worth being clear about what the santorini carnival is not, so that expectations match what actually happens.

Seven Greek carnivals, and where the santorini carnival sits among them.

Patras. The largest carnival in Greece and one of the biggest in Europe, running for weeks with tens of thousands of participants, a treasure-hunt game and a final parade that fills the city. If spectacle is what you want, that is where it is.

Naoussa, in Macedonia. The Genitsari and Boules, an archaic masked ritual with white wax masks and a dance that is far older than anything Christian. Unsettling and remarkable.

Skyros. Goat-bell wearers in animal skins, an unbroken pre-Christian tradition, and one of the most anthropologically interesting festivals in Europe.

Rethymno, in Crete. A large, organised carnival with a treasure hunt and a substantial parade.

Xanthi and Tyrnavos. Northern carnivals, one for its scale and multicultural mix and the other for a fertility rite that is considerably franker than most visitors expect.

The santorini carnival. A village and family carnival on an island of 15,500 people, in the low season, with school parades, satirical floats, a grilling day and a kite-flying Monday. Small, warm, entirely unpackaged, and with no other visitors in the frame.

Which to choose. Patras or Naoussa if the carnival is the trip. Santorini if you want to be somewhere extraordinary at the cheapest and emptiest time of year, with a genuine local festival happening around you.

Practical Notes for a Santorini Carnival Trip

Eleven practical points that a santorini carnival trip turns on.

Base in Fira. The only part of the island with year-round life, and the centre of the santorini carnival programme.

Hire a car or book a driver. The village parades are the good ones and the bus network runs a skeleton winter timetable.

Confirm the hotel is actually open. February listings sometimes stay live after a property has closed for the season. Message directly.

Bring warm clothes. 13 degrees with wind and rain on an exposed cliff is colder than the number suggests.

Waterproofs and grippy shoes. Wet marble steps in a Cycladic village are genuinely dangerous.

Buy a costume. For the final weekend. Everyone else will have one.

Buy a kite. They appear in Fira shops in the week before Clean Monday.

Book Tsiknopempti. A table in Fira, for the early afternoon.

Expect nothing to be scheduled precisely. Parades start when they start.

Cash. Cards work in Fira; a village club room on a carnival night may not take them.

Do not book a ferry on the day you fly. February fronts cancel sailings at short notice.

A Four-Day Santorini Carnival Itinerary

Four nights is the right length for a santorini carnival trip, ending on Clean Monday.

Thursday. Fly in through Athens, transfer to Fira, and walk the rim to Firostefani in the afternoon. Sunset at about half past six. Dinner in town.

Friday. Akrotiri at opening with the place to yourself, lunch in Megalochori, a winery at three, and the Museum of Prehistoric Thera if the weather turns. Village parade in the evening if one is on.

Saturday. The caldera path from Oia to Fira in the morning, four hours at a walking pace through the green version of the island. Costume on in the afternoon for the parades, and out late.

Sunday. The peak day of the santorini carnival: the main parade in Fira, floats and school groups, followed by whatever the town does afterwards. This is the peak of the santorini carnival.

Monday. Clean Monday. Buy lagana at a bakery in the morning, take a kite, and go to open ground — the fields near Pyrgos, the ridge below Profitis Ilias, or Perissa beach. Eat octopus, taramosalata and halva, and fly the kite until the light goes.

Tuesday. Transfer to the airport. Everything is quiet again.

If it rains for two days. Both museums, the wine museum in a cave, a winery and long lunches. February here rarely loses a whole day.

Who Carnival Suits

The split between the travellers the santorini carnival works for and the ones it does not is unusually clean.

People who want Greece rather than a resort. This is the strongest reason to come. Nothing about the santorini carnival is staged for visitors.

Photographers. Storm light over the caldera, a green island, empty villages, and a genuine festival with no other cameras in it.

Walkers. The best walking conditions of the year: 14 degrees, green hillsides and an empty caldera path.

Budget travellers. The cheapest week of the entire year on this island.

Second and third visits. If you have done the sights in summer, this shows you what is underneath them.

Families with school-age children. The parades are school parades, and children are the point of them.

Not for a beach holiday. The sea is 15 degrees and the resorts are shut.

Not for a first-and-only visit. Too much is closed, and the weather is a lottery.

Not for nightlife. Beyond the carnival nights themselves, there is very little.

Santorini Carnival: Frequently Asked Questions

When is the santorini carnival? Movable, tied to Orthodox Easter. It runs for the three weeks before Clean Monday, which is seven weeks before Orthodox Easter Sunday — so usually somewhere between early February and mid-March.

What is Apokries at the santorini carnival? The Greek name for the carnival season. It means “away from meat” and refers to the feasting before the Lenten fast.

What is Tsiknopempti at the santorini carnival? Smoky Thursday, in the second carnival week. The great meat-grilling day, when every taverna cooks outside.

What is Clean Monday? Kathara Deftera, the first day of Lent and a public holiday. Families picnic outdoors on Lenten food and fly kites.

Why kites at the santorini carnival? The tradition is usually explained as the soul rising towards God at the start of the fast. It is also very windy in February, which helps.

What do people eat on Clean Monday? Lagana bread, taramosalata, olives, pickles, octopus, squid, skordalia, fava and halva. No meat, dairy, eggs or fish with blood.

Where are the best santorini carnival parades? Fira for the main one, and Emporio, Pyrgos, Megalochori and Karterados for the village versions.

Should I dress up for the santorini carnival? Yes, for the final weekend. Everyone else does.

Is the santorini carnival worth travelling for? As the whole reason for a trip, only if you want an off-season island and a genuine local festival. As part of a cheap February trip, absolutely.

What is open during the santorini carnival? Fira all month, Akrotiri, Ancient Thera, both museums and the cable car on winter hours, and some wineries. Oia and the beach resorts are largely closed.

How do I find the programme? The municipality publishes it a week or two ahead, and posters go up in Fira. There is no reliable long-range schedule.

How cold is the santorini carnival? 12 to 16 degrees by day, 8 to 11 at night, with six to nine wet days across the month.

See the Island at Its Most Greek

We are a local operator running private tours and transfers in our own vehicles, and we work through the winter — which means we know which villages have something on in any given carnival week, and which roads to take to get there.

Tell us your dates and we will build the days around the programme, the weather and what is actually open.

Prices are per vehicle rather than per person, hotel pickup anywhere on the island is included, we guide in twelve languages, and an 80 EUR deposit confirms a date.

See the personalised tour, the private transfers, or contact us.

Every Village and Site on the Island

Any of these can be built into a private day. Each has its own page with what to see and how long to allow.

Caldera villages: Fira · Firostefani · Imerovigli · Oia · Finikia · Baxedes

Inland villages: Pyrgos · Megalochori · Emporio · Mesaria · Karterados · Vothonas · Vourvoulos · Exo Gonia · Mesa Gonia · Pigadia

Beaches: Perissa · Perivolos · Kamari · Vlychada · Monolithos · Red Beach · White Beach · Agios Georgios · Agia Paraskevi

Sites and landmarks: Akrotiri · Ancient Thira · Akrotiri Lighthouse · Nea Kameni · Palia Kameni · Thirasia · Athinios Port

All our tours: All Santorini tours · Full day tour · Sightseeing tour · Personalised tour · North part tour · Horse riding · South part tour · Sunset tour · Shore excursion · Caldera tour · Food experience · Wine tour · Historical tour · Small group tour

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