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The best-known festivals in Greece: 12 events worth the trip
Greece celebrates outdoors. Between June and September ancient theatres, city squares and beaches fill with tragedy, rock, dance, jazz and electronic music, while the winter and spring months belong to carnival parades and to Orthodox Holy Week. This guide introduces the twelve best-known festivals in Greece, with where and when they take place, what to expect and a practical tip for each.
Few countries have older festival addresses than Greece. In the 1950s the ancient theatres of Epidaurus and Philippi were brought back into use, and on summer evenings both still fill for tragedies and comedies written some two and a half thousand years ago. Performances begin after sunset, when the stone has cooled, and the acoustics of an open theatre do the work a sound system does elsewhere. Around that core the country has built a season that now covers every genre.
The modern festival scene is younger. Rockwave has brought international rock and metal to Attica since 1996 and settled at a park north of Athens; Release Athens has shaped the capital's summer since 2016; and in Thessaloniki, Reworks has been the reference for electronic music since 2005. Alongside them sit festivals of film, dance and jazz, many of them run by cities, municipal theatres and cultural organisations rather than by promoters, which shapes both their programmes and their audiences.
The other half of the calendar has nothing to do with wristbands. Apokries, the weeks before Orthodox Lent, bring the carnival parades of Patras and Xanthi; Holy Week fills Corfu with philharmonic bands and broken pottery; and from June onwards villages hold their panigiri on the name day of the local church, with the greatest number of them on 15 August. For visitors the rules are simple: plan for evenings rather than afternoons, book island crossings and rooms early, and expect the music to start late.
The festivals
Athens Epidaurus Festival
The Athens Epidaurus Festival has been part of the Greek summer since 1955 and is the backbone of the country's cultural year. Its programme runs from ancient tragedy and comedy to contemporary theatre, dance, classical concerts and music, with Greek companies and directors alongside international ones, and it stretches over roughly three months. For a large part of the Athenian audience the summer is measured in festival evenings, and productions of the Greek classics here are followed as closely as any premiere.
Its best-known stage is the ancient theatre of Epidaurus in the Argolid, in the Peloponnese, famous for acoustics that carry a voice from the orchestra to the top row without amplification. In Athens the festival works across several venues, among them the industrial halls of the Peiraios 260 complex, while for decades its centrepiece in the city was the Roman Odeon of Herodes Atticus on the slope below the Acropolis.
Tip: The theatre at Epidaurus is a long way from any station, so arrange the journey from Athens or Nafplio when you book, and take a cushion: the seating is ancient stone.
Release Athens
Release Athens opened in 2016 and has become the summer music series of the Greek capital. It is not one continuous weekend but a run of separate concert days spread over June and July, each with its own headliner and its own crowd: a metal night, an indie night, an electronic night, a veteran band that half the city has waited years to see. That format is the reason the festival covers so much ground without ever feeling like a compromise.
Almost all of it happens at Plateia Nerou, an open site on the Faliro coastal strip south of the centre, within sight of the sea and reachable by tram. There is no camping and no festival village: people arrive in the late afternoon, the sun sets behind the stage and the crowd disperses into the city afterwards. Greek acts open most of the evenings before the international headliner.
Tip: Every date is sold separately, so check which day matches your taste before buying, and take the tram to Delta Falirou and walk the last stretch: parking near the site is scarce when a big name plays.
Rockwave Festival
Rockwave is the veteran of Greek music festivals. It began in 1996, moved between beaches, ports and stadiums in its early years and has been the country's reference for rock and metal since then, booking the touring giants of both genres as well as alternative and pop names. For a generation of Greek fans it was the first place they saw an international band, and its anniversaries are followed in the press like those of an institution.
Since 2004 its home has been Terra Vibe Park at Malakasa, a pine-covered site in the hills north of Athens with a large main stage and a smaller one beside it. Days are long and hot, the programme usually starts in the afternoon and the headliner plays well after dark. The audience is a mix of Athenians who travel up for the evening and fans who come from across the country.
Tip: The site is well outside the city, so check the festival's coach transfers from central Athens before making other travel plans, and bring a hat and water for the afternoon sets.
Reworks Festival
Reworks has been the benchmark for electronic music in Greece since 2005. Held every September in Thessaloniki, it runs for several days and combines club nights with live electronic performances, audiovisual projects and discussion, booking international DJs and producers alongside Greek artists. Its reputation rests on curation rather than on size: the festival is credited with much of the way club culture developed in northern Greece, and its audience follows the programme rather than the headline.
It does not take place on a field but across the city, using venues in the centre and by the port, among them the converted buildings of Thessaloniki's old slaughterhouse. A separate strand, Reworks Agora, brings talks and debate about the future of club culture to the city at another point in the year. September in Thessaloniki is still warm, and the festival slides naturally into the bar life of the city centre.
Tip: Nights run very late and the venues are within walking distance of one another, so stay in the centre and treat the afternoon as recovery time rather than sightseeing.
Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Founded in 1960, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival is the most important film event in Greece and one of the oldest in south-eastern Europe. Every November it fills the city with international competition films, Greek premieres, retrospectives, tributes and masterclasses, with a long-standing focus on first and second features by directors at the start of their careers. The atmosphere is famously informal: filmmakers, critics and audiences end up in the same bars afterwards.
Its home is the Olympion, the listed cinema on Aristotelous Square, together with converted warehouses on the waterfront at the port, which give the festival its second centre a short walk from the promenade. The same organisation runs the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival every March, so the city has two film weeks a year, at opposite ends of the calendar.
Tip: Screenings run from midday to late evening at two clusters of venues; consider a festival pass if you plan more than a couple of films, and book the evening premieres well in advance.
Philippi Festival
Ancient drama returned to the theatre of Philippi in 1957, and the festival that grew from that evening is among the oldest in Greece. Programmed today by the municipal regional theatre of Kavala, it runs through the summer with tragedy and comedy, contemporary theatre, concerts, dance and site-specific work, in Greek and occasionally in other languages with surtitles. It is a festival of a region rather than of a capital, and local audiences treat it as their own.
The theatre itself stands inside the archaeological site of Philippi, near the village of Krinides, a short drive inland from Kavala. The city was founded in the fourth century BC and the site has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2016, so the interval is spent among Roman ruins and early Christian basilicas. Performances begin in the evening, when the heat of the Macedonian plain has dropped.
Tip: There is little public transport to the site after a performance, so arrange a car or a taxi from Kavala, and arrive early enough to walk the ruins in the low evening light.
Kalamata International Dance Festival
Since 1995 Kalamata has been the address for contemporary dance in Greece. For ten days in July the town in the southern Peloponnese hosts international companies and choreographers alongside Greek creators, with premieres, solos, large ensemble pieces and work that would rarely be seen elsewhere in the country. Around the performances run workshops, talks and open classes, which is why so many Greek dancers and students plan their summer around it.
The festival is built into the town rather than placed beside it: performances take place in the purpose-built dance centre, in the old railway park, in the castle and in squares and open-air settings around Kalamata, and some of them are free to watch. The sea is ten minutes away, so a festival day can begin on the beach and end with a premiere.
Tip: Check the programme for the outdoor and free performances before buying tickets for everything, and book a room early: July is high season on the Messenian coast.
Patras Carnival
The Patras Carnival is the best-known carnival in Greece and by a distance the biggest event in the city's year. It opens on 17 January and runs until Clean Monday, the start of Orthodox Lent, so the dates move with the Orthodox Easter. Those weeks are filled with balls, a city-wide treasure hunt, a children's carnival and neighbourhood parties, and thousands of people take part in organised groups that rehearse and sew their costumes for months.
One tradition belongs to Patras alone: the bourboulia, a masked ball with roots in the nineteenth century at which women appear in a black domino and mask, remain anonymous and choose their own partners. The final weekend brings the night parade of the carnival groups on Saturday and the parade of floats on Sunday, and the celebration ends with the ritual burning of the carnival king on the pier in the harbour.
Tip: The closing weekend fills every hotel in Patras and in the towns around it, so book months ahead and pick a viewing spot along the route rather than at the start of the parade.
Easter in Corfu
Holy Week on Corfu is among the most striking Easter celebrations in Greece and the island's great annual event. Its sound is brass: the island's philharmonic societies, a tradition going back to the nineteenth century, play through the week, with solemn funeral marches on Good Friday as the epitaphios processions move through the old town. Visitors come from the mainland and from abroad for a week in which the whole town is in the street, from morning until long after dark.
The moment everyone waits for is the First Resurrection on Holy Saturday morning, when large clay pots of water are thrown from the balconies of the old town and smash on the pavement below, a custom usually traced back to Venetian times. It happens around eleven, with the bands playing and the crowd pressed into the Spianada and the surrounding lanes; the celebration continues that night and through Easter Sunday.
Tip: Be on the Spianada well before eleven on Holy Saturday, keep back from the balconies, and wear shoes you do not mind scuffing: the street is covered in broken pottery afterwards.
Matala Beach Festival
Matala Beach Festival began in 2011 as a tribute to the hippies who lived in the cliff caves of this village on the south coast of Crete in the 1960s and 1970s. It has grown into a free open-air festival of live music over several days, with Greek and international bands, art and workshops on and around the beach. The crowd is as mixed as the programme: families from the surrounding villages, Cretan regulars, travellers and a fair number of returning veterans.
The setting does most of the work. The stage stands on the sand of a small bay closed off by a sandstone cliff full of carved caves, an archaeological site in its own right, and the concerts run into the night with the sea a few metres away. The village itself is tiny, a single street of tavernas and rooms, and it is completely taken over for the duration.
Tip: Entry is free but beds are not: book a room in Matala, Pitsidia or Kalamaki well ahead, or plan the drive back over the mountains to Heraklion, roughly seventy kilometres away.
Sani Festival
Sani Festival began in the early 1990s as a jazz festival on the Kassandra peninsula in Halkidiki and has kept jazz at its heart while opening up to pop, rock, classical music and the great names of Greek song. Concerts are spread over several weeks of high summer rather than packed into a single weekend, which gives each evening the feel of an occasion rather than of a slot in a timetable. It has become one of the fixed summer appointments in the north of the country.
The main stage sits on Sani Hill, a low rise beside a Byzantine watchtower with the Aegean below and the sunset behind the musicians. The audience is a mixture of holidaymakers from the surrounding resorts and beaches and people who drive down from Thessaloniki for the evening, and the programme is deliberately broad enough to hold both.
Tip: Concerts start after sunset and the hill is open to the sea breeze, so take something warm for later, and arrive early for the view over the gulf before the lights go down.
Xanthi Carnival
The carnival of Xanthi has been held since 1966 and is the great celebration of the Greek north. It is officially part of the Thracian Folklore Festivities, and that combination is what makes it unusual: weeks of concerts, dance evenings, exhibitions, street games and neighbourhood parties run alongside folklore groups from the villages of Thrace and from abroad, in a city where Greek, Pomak and Roma traditions have lived side by side for generations.
Much of it plays out in the old town, a hillside of Ottoman-era mansions, neoclassical houses and nineteenth-century tobacco warehouses. The programme builds to a grand parade of floats and costumed groups through the city, and it closes with the burning of the Tzaros, an effigy set alight on the final evening before Clean Monday, a fire rite brought to the region by refugees from Eastern Thrace.
Tip: Parade day is the busiest by far; if you prefer the traditional side of the carnival, come for one of the folklore evenings earlier in the programme, when the old town is at its best.
For artists and organisers
The large Greek festivals are put together by a small number of promoters and by the festivals' own artistic directors, who confirm international names in winter and fill the Greek slots in spring. For most acts the way in lies elsewhere: municipal cultural organisations and regional theatres run summer programmes in almost every town, hotels and resorts book live music from June to September, and local associations organise the panigiria, the carnival evenings and the city festivals. Those bookers work locally and search online, and a EuroActs profile with video, category, city and travel area is what they find.
For organisers of town festivals, municipal summer programmes, beach events and carnival nights, the question is usually how to find a reliable act quickly and without a long chain of intermediaries. On EuroActs, artists and venues across eighteen countries are listed with their category, location and working area, and organisers contact them directly, with no commission and nobody in between. The budget stays where it belongs: on the stage.
Frequently asked questions
Which is the biggest festival in Greece?
It depends on what is being measured. The Athens Epidaurus Festival is the largest cultural institution: it programmes dozens of productions across three months, at Epidaurus and on a string of stages in Athens. Among music festivals, Release Athens and Rockwave have the biggest stages and the best-known international names. The Patras Carnival occupies an entire city for weeks, but street celebrations are not ticketed and nobody counts them, so a direct comparison is not possible.
When is the festival season in Greece?
The main season runs from June to September. June and July bring Rockwave and Release Athens, July the Kalamata dance festival and the start of Philippi and Sani, August the ancient drama at Epidaurus and Philippi and the village panigiria, and September Reworks in Thessaloniki. Autumn and winter belong to the Dimitria festival in Thessaloniki in October and the film festival in November, while carnival fills the weeks before Orthodox Lent.
Are there free festivals in Greece?
Yes, and several of the best known cost nothing. The Matala Beach Festival on Crete is free, and the Athens Technopolis Jazz Festival has been staged free of charge at the old gasworks in Gazi since 2001. The carnival parades in Patras and Xanthi and the Easter celebrations in Corfu are open to everyone, and so is every village panigiri, where the music and the dancing are paid for by the community itself.
Which Greek festivals are best for electronic music?
Reworks in Thessaloniki is the reference: an electronic festival since 2005, held each September across venues in the city, with a separate strand of talks about club culture. In Athens, Plisskën programmes electronic, indie and experimental acts, and Release Athens gives several of its dates to electronic headliners. Outside the festival calendar, much of the scene lives in open-air venues around Athens and in summer club nights on the islands.
How can artists get booked at festivals in Greece?
The large festivals are booked by promoters and in-house programmers who look for acts with a track record: good live video, a clear working area and a realistic fee. For most acts the first real stages are municipal summer programmes, city and village festivals, hotel and resort events and carnival evenings, and those are booked by councils, cultural associations and venues that search online. A EuroActs profile in Greek and fourteen other languages makes an act findable for exactly those bookers.
Festivals in other countries
18 countries · 15 languages
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