Clean Monday Kite Festival: Mpati Beach, Athens Riviera

Clean Monday — Kathara Deftera — marks the start of Great Lent in the Greek Orthodox calendar, the day after the last blowout of Apokries. The "clean" in the name is literal: it's the point where households traditionally moved from meat and rich food to the simpler, meat- and dairy-free diet of the fifty days before Easter. But it's not a solemn day. Families head outdoors for kite-flying and picnics, and the kite itself carries the meaning — its climb into the sky is read as a symbol of the soul rising, tying an old physical practice to what the fast is supposed to be preparing people for.

Nobody agrees on exactly where the custom came from. Some trace it eastward, to kite-flying traditions that reached Greece through trade routes; others point to Archytas of Tarentum, a 4th-century BC Greek mathematician credited with building an early mechanical flying device centuries before anyone called it a kite. Whichever version is true, the result today is the same every March: beaches and open hillsides across the country fill with color for one afternoon.

This particular stretch of coast is Mpati Beach in Alimos, a short walk from the marina, on the same run of Athens Riviera shoreline as Palaio Faliro just to the north. It's an unassuming beach on any ordinary day — but on Clean Monday it becomes one of the city's default gathering points, close enough to the center that no one needs a car to get there.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not a beach day, but a single afternoon in March when an entire city's Lent begins with hundreds of kites going up over the water at once.