Kites, Carnival, and Reflection: Greece Marks Clean Monday, Lent

Kite-flying, children successful fancy dress, picnics where possible, and household gatherings astir tables laden with Lenten fare –seafood, legumes and unleavened lagana bread – are the ubiquitous highlights of Clean Monday successful Greece.

Clean Monday, the archetypal time of Great Lent successful the Orthodox Christian calendar, falls connected March 3 this year. It is the start of the accelerated which culminates successful Holy Week and ends with Easter – Pascha in Greek. This year, Easter Sunday will beryllium celebrated by some Western and Eastern churches connected the aforesaid day: April 20.

Clean Monday, which is besides known arsenic Shrove oregon Pure Monday successful the West and Kathara Deftera in Greek, is successful galore ways the equivalent of Catholic Ash Wednesday. It is simply a moveable feast which ever falls connected the sixth Monday earlier Palm Sunday, which marks the start of Orthodox Holy Week, oregon 48 days earlier Easter Sunday.

So there is much to Clean Monday than the merriment, folkloric traditions and rites. An important feast day, it besides has a almighty spiritual aspect, marking a play of repentance and fasting for the faithful up of Easter. Abstention from each meats and dairy products, arsenic well arsenic oils and wines connected weekdays (though olive lipid is allowed connected Clean Monday itself) aims to hole the Christian faithful for the commemoration of Christ’s Resurrection connected Easter Sunday.

For the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Greek Orthodox tradition successful particular, Clean Monday is the opening of Clean Week, a detoxification-cum-induction into the Lenten journey: the cleansing of assemblage and soul, a ceremonious endeavor to permission down each sinful thoughts and practices, to execute intelligence abstinence and participate a wilderness of repentance – a notation to the Gospels.

Beyond the weighty spiritual value of the day, however, Clean Monday celebrations successful Greece and elsewhere successful the Balkans are a half-day continuation of the joviality of the three-week carnival that precedes Lent. A play of masquerading and revelry, Apokries culminates successful respective locations with parades of floats and street performers.

According to Prof. Manolis Varvounis, the archetypal portion of Clean Monday is simply a continuation of the irreverent Apokries, with Great Lent opening successful the day with a Vespers religion service.

Varvounis, a prof of Folklore successful the Department of History and Ethnology astatine the Democritus University of Thrace successful northeast Greece, cites the well-known customized of vomolohiká in which revelers simulate lewd acts and sing salacious songs focused connected copulation and lovemaking, with representations of phalluses prominently displayed.

“… earlier spring, everything seems dead. So, this was a way for radical to ‘arouse’ nature. It’s a pre-Christian ritual and very old; successful fact, we think it could perchance predate humanity’s determination from hunting and gathering to imperishable agriculture. As a signifier of resurrection and reproduction, it is mirrored by traditions successful a large galore different cultures.”

Prof. Varvounis told To BHMA International Edition that “They proceed until the day of Monday, with church-going afterwards. On Samos, for instance, my autochthonal island, when the religion bells would ringing astatine 5 successful the day connected Clean Monday, galore of the faithful would pain corks from bottles of wine they’d drunk astatine the festive table and use them to gully a Cross connected their forehead, demonstrating that the amusive was implicit and Great Lent had begun”.