Tradition tours in Santorini
Most santorini traditions are not put on for visitors: the Orthodox calendar, the village panigiria, three-day weddings, the basket-trained vine and the cave house. Come at Easter or in December, go inland, and you will see all of them.
Make a traditional exhibition in Santorini with Santorini Tours!
Santorini is one of the islands that have held on their rich tradition over the centuries. Today the tradition of Santorini is kept alive in several aspects of everyday life, mainly through traditional products and through festivals.
The historical vineyards of Santorini
Both the local products and the festivals of Santorini maintain an unbroken line of life with the past of the island, both recent and distant. It is a fact that the cultivation and production of wine in Santorini was already known to the inhabitants of the prehistoric settlement of Akrotiri, something that was known to the public from the excavations.
This means that already in 1700 BC in Santorini, people drank the same (naturally) wine that fills the glasses of locals and visitors today. It is even certain that the current vineyard of Santorini is the continuation of that, which was planted on the island after the Minoan eruption of the volcano, around 1200 BC. Therefore it is about 3200 years old!
You can enjoy the combination of history and tradition in Santorini by booking now a Santorini historical tour.
The traditional products of Santorini
Feta, barley, anhydrous tomato, goat and other products produced by this dry and soiled (and at the same time endowed) land of Santorini, are among the finest and most sophisticated flavors of Greece.
The tradition of most of these crops also starts from prehistoric times, with the famous frescoes of Akrotiri Krokosyclektery demonstrating that in the 17th century BC the Santorinians knew this rare plant and exploited it.
At the feasts of the island, one can still see today how the tradition of centuries is kept alive through the spirit of the people. The music played by local organists with their traditional instruments, the food that is shared by the faithful and has lived for decades, the joy of which small and large people participate, proves that tradition continues unceasingly. You can take a tour in Santorini anytime!
See more about Santorini island tours:
- Santorini full day private tour
- Santorini sightseeing private tour
- Santorini exclusive shore private tour
- Santorini impressive Caldera private tour
- Santorini south part private tour
- Santorini north part private tour
- Santorini sunset private tour
Santorini Traditions: What Actually Survives
Most santorini traditions are not performances put on for visitors. They are the working calendar of about fifteen thousand people who live here all year, and the ones worth seeing happen in the months when almost nobody is looking.
Four things carry the santorini traditions. The Orthodox calendar, which sets Easter, Christmas, Epiphany and hundreds of saint’s days. The agricultural year, which sets pruning, harvest and the tomato season. The family, which sets weddings, baptisms and name days. And the geology, which produced the cave house, the basket vine and the underground cellar because there was no other way to build or farm here.
What follows is what those traditions are, when they happen, what is genuine and what is staged for a coach party. If you want to see the real thing, come in April or December rather than August.
What Are the Religious Santorini Traditions?
The church year is the spine of santorini traditions, and it is more visible here than in most of Europe.
Easter
The biggest of all santorini traditions by a distance, and bigger than Christmas. Holy Week runs with services every evening. On Good Friday the Epitaphios – a flower-covered bier – is carried through the villages after dark, with candles. At midnight on Holy Saturday the churches go dark, the light is passed from candle to candle, the priest announces the Resurrection and fireworks go off over the caldera. Then everyone eats magiritsa soup at one in the morning.
Sunday is lamb on a spit, red eggs cracked against each other, and families at long tables from midday. The island fills with Greek visitors rather than foreign ones, and it is the single best week to witness santorini traditions as they actually are.
Christmas and New Year
Quieter than Easter and warmer than you would expect. The winter santorini traditions run from mid-December to Epiphany. Children go door to door singing kalanda with a triangle on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve and Epiphany Eve. Bakeries make christopsomo, melomakarona and kourabiedes from mid-December. On New Year’s Eve the vasilopita is cut just after midnight with a coin baked inside, and Saint Basil rather than Santa brings the presents on the first of January.
Epiphany, 6 January
The blessing of the waters. A priest throws a cross into the sea – at Ammoudi, at the old port, at Kamari – and young men dive in after it in January water. Whoever surfaces holding it is blessed for the year. Entirely local, entirely unstaged, and one of the most striking santorini traditions to witness.
Carnival and Clean Monday
Apokries runs for three weeks before Lent, with costumes and parades in Fira. It ends with Kathara Deftera, when the island flies kites and eats seafood, taramosalata and lagana flatbread outdoors.
Lent
The Lenten santorini traditions run forty days of nistisima – fasting food that is effectively vegan – and it produces some of the best cooking of the year. Santorini food.
15 August
The Dormition of the Virgin, and the biggest of the summer santorini traditions. Village churches hold services and the panigiria that follow are the liveliest nights of the year in places like Emporio and Megalochori.
Saint’s days
There are said to be several hundred chapels on this island, many of them private, built by families in thanks or in memory. Each has its own day, and on that day the family opens it, a service is held and food is shared. If you happen on one, you will be fed.
What Are the Family Santorini Traditions?
Weddings
A traditional island wedding ran for three days, and it is the most elaborate of the family santorini traditions. and elements of it survive. The bride’s dowry and household linen were carried publicly to the new home. Musicians played through the night. Guests were given koufeto – white pumpkin and almonds in honey – and it is still handed out at weddings here.
Rice and sugared almonds are thrown, the couple are led to the church with music, and the celebration afterwards goes very late. Of all the santorini traditions this is the one visitors are most likely to stumble into, because summer Saturdays are full of them. Santorini weddings.
Baptisms
Held on saint’s days where possible, with the godparent providing the clothes and the cross. The child is fully immersed three times. The party afterwards is as large as a wedding.
Name days
Among the santorini traditions visitors notice least and locals live by most. More important than birthdays. If you are called Nikos, 6 December is your day and you do the hosting rather than being hosted. This genuinely governs the social calendar.
Memorials
Kollyva – boiled wheat with sugar, nuts and pomegranate – is prepared and shared at memorial services. You will see it offered outside churches on Saturday mornings.
Hospitality
The single most consistent of the santorini traditions and the one visitors meet first. The free dessert, the extra glass of raki, the plate that arrives unordered. It is not upselling and refusing it reads as a rebuff. Accept, thank, move on.
What Are the Working Santorini Traditions?
These are the santorini traditions the geology forced, and they are visible everywhere once you know what you are looking at.
The kouloura vine
The most visible of the working santorini traditions. Vines woven flat into a low circular basket, with the grapes growing inside sheltered from the wind and the sun. It takes years to train, it is done by hand, and there is nothing else like it in European viticulture. Pruning happens in January and February, one cane at a time, in the cold. Wine tour.
The canava
Underground vaulted cellars cut into the pumice to keep wine cool without ice, from the centuries when the island exported wine in volume to Russia and the Black Sea. Several working estates are built around one.
The yposkafa
Cave houses dug horizontally into the soft volcanic rock, with a barrel-vaulted front room and cool storage behind. They cost nothing but labour, they hold a steady temperature all year, and every cave hotel on the caldera is a version of this. Genuine yposkafa are still lived in at Vothonas, Finikia and Karterados. Vothonas.
Dry-farming
No irrigation at all, which is the oldest of the agricultural santorini traditions. Tomatoes, fava and vines survive on night moisture pulled out of the sea air by the porous ash. It is why the fruit is tiny and the flavour concentrated, and it is a technique rather than an accident.
The dry stone terraces
Walls built without mortar to hold soil on the slopes and shelter crops from the wind. Maintaining them is constant work and a good deal of it has stopped, because tourism pays better than farming.
Capers and sun-drying
Capers gathered wild and salted, tomatoes dried on the roof, grapes laid on mats for Vinsanto. Preservation without refrigeration is the oldest of the working santorini traditions.
The whitewash
Lime wash on walls and on the lanes themselves, renewed every spring. It disinfects, it reflects heat, and it is the reason the villages are the colour they are. The blue is a later fashion, not an ancient rule.
Donkeys and mules
The island’s freight network before roads, still working the vineyards and the lanes inland where no vehicle can go. That is different from the cliff-steps tourist trade. Santorini donkeys.
What About Music, Dance and Crafts?
The instruments
The musical santorini traditions run on the violi, the laouto and, on the older islands, the tsampouna – a goatskin bagpipe. At a village panigiri you will hear all three, played live, with nobody dancing for a camera.
The dances
Balos and syrtos are the Cycladic dances, done in a line or in pairs, and everyone joins. The circle opens for you, which is not a courtesy but an expectation.
Panigiria
The saint’s day festival: a service, then tables in the square, food cooked by the village, wine from the barrel, and music until very late. Scattered across the summer calendar and almost never advertised. This is where santorini traditions are actually alive rather than described.
Pottery
The island’s clay and volcanic ash made a long ceramic tradition, and it is one of the few craft santorini traditions still practised commercially. and small workshops still throw and fire inland. Prices in a village workshop are a fraction of the caldera gift shops.
Weaving and embroidery
Household linen was part of the dowry and was woven at home. Some of it survives in village museums and in older houses.
Boatbuilding and fishing
Small-boat fishing out of Vlychada, Ammoudi and the smaller harbours, with wooden caiques still working. Vlychada.
The kafeneio
The most durable of the daily santorini traditions. The traditional coffee house: men, Greek coffee, backgammon, and a two-hour sitting over one cup. Still functioning in Emporio, Megalochori, Pyrgos and the working villages, and a completely different institution from a caldera cafe. Emporio.
What Are the Everyday Customs?
The evil eye. Mati. A blue eye charm on a doorway, a car mirror or a baby’s clothes, and an older relative who can lift it with oil and water and a prayer. Widely and sincerely held.
Spitting. A soft ftou ftou after a compliment, to avoid attracting the eye. It is a blessing rather than an insult.
Name days over birthdays. You host on your name day.
Sunday lunch. Three generations at one table from two o’clock. The single most reliable of the weekly santorini traditions.
Late dinner. Nine o’clock, and the busiest hour is half past nine to eleven.
Shared plates. Mezedes in the middle. Ordering a main each reads as slightly odd.
Sitting. A freddo is a place to spend two hours, not a drink to finish.
Church etiquette. Cover shoulders and knees inside, do not photograph a service, and light a candle at the entrance if you want to.
Doors left open. In the working villages, mid-morning, because the neighbours are expected.
Naming children after grandparents. Which is why every village has six men with the same name and everyone uses nicknames.
Where Can You See Santorini Traditions?
Not on the caldera rim, is the short answer. The santorini traditions on this page live inland and in winter.
Pyrgos
The best village on the island for santorini traditions. A medieval hill village with a Venetian castle, thirty-odd churches, and one of the most striking Good Friday observances on the island, when the whole village is lit with candles and lanterns. Pyrgos.
Emporio
The largest village and the least visited, with a defensive kastelli whose lanes were laid out to confuse pirates, the Goulas tower, and working kafeneia. The best place on the island to see ordinary life rather than tourism.
Megalochori
Bell towers, walled captains’ mansions, cave houses and two wineries within walking distance. Village panigiria here are among the liveliest. Megalochori.
Vothonas and Finikia
Two villages built into ravines, with cave houses still lived in and churches dug into the rock. Finikia.
The wineries
The kouloura vines, the canavas and the harvest, which are the santorini traditions that still pay for themselves. Visit in late August or September and you will see the working version rather than the explained one.
The wine museum
Six metres underground at Vothonas, with life-size figures showing winegrowing as it was done from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The clearest single explanation of the working santorini traditions available. Wine museum.
The tomato industrial museum
At Vlychada, in the old paste factory, with the original machinery. It explains the island’s economy before tourism better than anything else on it.
Akrotiri
Not a tradition but the origin of them: a Bronze Age town with streets, drainage and frescoes, buried in the eruption around 1600 BC. People were eating and farming here in a recognisable way three and a half thousand years ago. Akrotiri.
What Is Real and What Is Staged?
Worth saying plainly, because a good deal is sold as santorini traditions here.
Real santorini traditions. Easter, Epiphany, the panigiria, name days, weddings, kollyva, the evil eye, the kafeneio, the pruning and the harvest, the whitewashing in spring, the Sunday table.
Real but commercialised. Cooking classes, winery tours and folk-dance evenings. These are genuine content presented for visitors, which is fine as long as you know that is what it is.
Not a tradition. The donkey ride up the 588 steps, which is a tourist trade rather than a survival of the freight network. The blue domes as an ancient national colour scheme – the blue is a twentieth-century fashion. Any “traditional Greek night” with a set menu and a dance display.
How to tell. If it is advertised in English on a board on the caldera rim, it is for you. If it is happening in a village square on a Tuesday in November with no sign at all, it is not.
The honest position. Tourism has hollowed out some of the santorini traditions and preserved others by making them worth money. The wine survived because it became valuable. The terraces are disappearing because they did not.
When Should You Come to See Santorini Traditions?
Easter, usually April
The best single week for santorini traditions. Holy Week services, the Epitaphios processions on Good Friday, the midnight Resurrection with fireworks over the caldera, and lamb on the Sunday. Book early – Greek visitors fill the island.
December and January
Christmas carols, vasilopita, and the Epiphany dive on the sixth. Cold, quiet and completely unstaged. Santorini in winter.
February and March
Carnival, Clean Monday and the kite-flying, plus vine pruning in the fields and almond blossom on the terraces.
Late August and September
The grape harvest, and 15 August, which brings the biggest panigiria of the summer.
July and August otherwise
The hardest time to see any of the santorini traditions. The island is at maximum tourist pressure and the santorini traditions retreat indoors and inland.
The general rule
Come out of season, go inland, and eat late. Everything on this page becomes visible.
Santorini Traditions: Frequently Asked Questions
What are the main santorini traditions? The Orthodox calendar – Easter above all, then Christmas, Epiphany and the saint’s day panigiria – plus name days, three-day weddings, the basket-trained vine, the cave house, dry-farming and salted capers.
When is the best time to see them? Easter, usually in April, is the biggest. December and January give you the carols and the Epiphany dive. Late August brings the harvest and the 15 August feasts.
What happens at Greek Easter in Santorini? Nightly services through Holy Week, the flower-covered Epitaphios carried through the villages on Good Friday, the midnight Resurrection with fireworks over the caldera, magiritsa soup at one in the morning, and lamb on the spit on Sunday.
What is the Epiphany dive? On 6 January a priest throws a cross into the sea at Ammoudi, the old port and Kamari, and swimmers dive for it. Whoever surfaces with it is blessed for the year.
What is a panigiri? A village saint’s day festival: a church service, then communal food, wine from the barrel and live music until very late. Rarely advertised.
What is koufeto? A wedding sweet of white pumpkin and almonds in honey, handed to guests. Specific to the island.
Why are the houses built into the rock? Yposkafa cave houses were dug into the soft volcanic pumice because it cost nothing but labour and stays cool all year. Every cave hotel on the caldera is a version of one.
Why are the vines grown in baskets? The kouloura shelters the fruit from the meltemi wind and traps night moisture on an island with almost no rainfall. It takes years to train and exists essentially nowhere else.
Are name days more important than birthdays? Yes, and you host rather than being hosted.
What is the evil eye? Mati – a blue charm against envy, and an older relative who can lift it with oil, water and a prayer. Widely and sincerely held.
Where do I see the real thing rather than a show? Inland: Pyrgos, Emporio, Megalochori, Vothonas. In winter and the shoulder months. In a village square rather than on the caldera rim.
Is the donkey ride a tradition? No. Donkeys were the island’s freight network and still work the vineyards, but the cliff-steps ride is a tourist trade. We ask you to take the cable car.
See the Island Behind the Postcard
We are a local operator, based here all year, and the days we most enjoy running are the ones that go inland: the kastelli at Emporio, the castle at Pyrgos, a working winery among the basket vines, a cave house at Vothonas, and a long lunch in a village that cooks for its neighbours.
Tell us your dates and what interests you. Prices are per vehicle rather than per person, so a family of four pays what a couple pays, hotel pickup anywhere on the island is included, we guide in twelve languages, and an 80 EUR deposit confirms a date.
See the historical tour, the villages of Santorini, the full list of tours, or the FAQ.
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
Planning and services: Famous sights tour · Private transfers · Transfers to Oia and Finikia · Transfers to other villages · Villages of Santorini · History of Santorini · Tours near you · Languages we guide in · Food and fun tours · Gay friendly tours · Our tour buses · Daily tours · Day tours · FAQ · Gallery · Tour photo gallery · About us · Contact · Blog
