Holidays in Greece

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Greece

A Bronze Machine That Knew When Eclipses Would Fall

In 1901, sponge divers sheltering from a storm near the small island of Antikythera stumbled onto a Roman-era shipwreck roughly forty-five metres down, its cargo a mix of bronze and marble statues. Among the pieces hauled up over the following months was a corroded, unremarkable lump of metal that sat largely ignored in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens until someone noticed a gear wheel embedded in the corrosion. What it turned out to be, once painstakingly reconstructed over the following century, was a hand-cranked mechanical calculator, built somewhere between roughly 150 and 100 BCE, capable of predicting the timing, type and even the expected colour of solar and lunar eclipses years in advance.

The device achieved this using more than thirty interlocking bronze gears to model a 223-lunar-month cycle known to Babylonian astronomers, alongside separate dials tracking the moon's irregular motion and, on a smaller display, the four-year Olympiad cycle governing the Panhellenic athletic festivals. Modern researchers, including a UCL-led team that produced a detailed model of its gearing in 2021, believe its design traces back to the astronomical tradition associated with Hipparchus, possibly built on the island of Rhodes. Nothing of comparable mechanical sophistication is known to have existed anywhere in the world for roughly the next fourteen centuries, a gap that still leaves researchers debating exactly how the skills behind it were lost.

A Tower Built to Tell Time Whether or Not the Sun Cooperated

On the edge of the Roman Agora in Athens stands an octagonal marble tower, just over thirteen metres tall, that solved a basic problem faced by every sundial ever built: they are useless at night or under cloud cover. Constructed in the 2nd century BCE by the astronomer Andronikos of Kyrrhos, the structure known today as the Tower of the Winds carried nine separate sundials across its outer walls to track the hours whenever direct sunlight was available.

For every other hour, the tower relied on a large water clock housed inside, fed by a channel running down from a spring on the Acropolis, letting timekeepers read the hour even in darkness or under overcast skies, a genuine mechanical backup system nearly two thousand years before anyone spoke the phrase. Each of the tower's eight faces was carved with a relief figure representing the wind that blew from that direction, based on an eight-point compass system the geographer Eratosthenes had developed by consolidating an earlier, more unwieldy scheme of twelve winds, and the whole structure was topped by a bronze weathervane, making it, by most accounts, the world's first purpose-built combination of a sundial, a water clock and a weather station under one roof.

Five Ways to Name a Single Year

Before any shared calendar existed across the Greek world, dating an event with precision was a genuine scholarly problem. Each city-state kept its own local calendar, commonly naming years after whichever magistrate held office, which meant a date meaningful in Athens carried no obvious equivalent in Sparta or Argos. The historian Thucydides, needing to fix the exact year a major conflict began, resorted to naming it five separate ways at once: by the number of years since a prior peace treaty, by the tenure of the priestess of Hera at Argos, by a named magistrate in Sparta, by a named magistrate in Athens, and by the number of months elapsed since a specific battle.

The fix that eventually emerged came not from any calendar reform but from sport. Because the Olympic Games were held every four years at a single Panhellenic site, with an increasingly reliable list of victors going back to a games traditionally dated to 776 BCE, Greek historians began using the four-year interval between Olympiads purely as a chronological reference, independent of any city's local calendar. The scholar Eratosthenes formalised the system in the third century BCE, and the historian Timaeus of Tauromenium was the first to apply it consistently across his work, giving Greek historiography something it had never had before: a single timeline that worked the same way whether the events described had happened in Athens, Sparta or anywhere else in the Greek-speaking world.

The Thirteen Days Greece Skipped to Catch Up

Long after the rest of Catholic and Protestant Europe had adopted the Gregorian calendar, Greece continued using the older Julian system into the twentieth century, a gap that had grown to thirteen full days by the 1920s. The Greek government finally legislated the change for civil purposes in 1923: what would have been Thursday, 16 February under the old calendar became Thursday, 1 March under the new one, with the intervening thirteen dates simply omitted from the civil record, making Greece the last country in Europe to make the switch, over three centuries after Pope Gregory XIII's original 1582 reform.

The Church of Greece followed a year later, but rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it approved a mathematically distinct compromise known as the Revised Julian calendar in 1924, which recalculates leap years with enough precision that its civil dates will not actually diverge from the Gregorian calendar until the year 2800. The change nonetheless split the Orthodox world: some churches and a portion of Greek society rejected the revision entirely, continuing to mark Christmas by the old calendar's 7 January rather than 25 December, a schism between so-called Old and New Calendarists within Greek Orthodoxy that has persisted, largely unresolved, for a century.

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