How I Learned to Party at a Greek Panigyri

There’s a summer celebration of food, live music, and impromptu dancing that you can only find on the Greek islands.

Illustrations by Ryan Johnson

As daylight broke, in the tiny village of Pyrgi, on the Greek island of Chios, my friends and I followed a smell of cheesy baked bread through empty streets and vacant squares. I was moments away from having the best tiropita, a cheese-stuffed pastry perfect for breakfast, of my life. I had pulled an all-nighter in the village square, watching the sun climb up the walls and giving me the first look at Pyrgi during daylight. One bite was the perfect way to finish dancing, eating, and drinking with an entire village on a beautiful Greek island.

I had been at a panigyri, which is more than just a summer party. The panigyri is a festival that celebrates an island’s saints, and the biggest one across all the Greek islands falls on August 15, for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. These festivals only happen during the summer, and while the foods and dates vary among islands, they all have a few things in common: plenty of food, live traditional music from that island, and a huge turnout. Nobody is left out of the celebrations. On Chios, word spreads quickly when the party is happening — which village it is, and what time it’s going to start.

Chios is just a 30-minute ferry ride off the coast of Turkey. It doesn’t have quintessentially Greek whitewashed buildings and blue-painted rooftops. Instead, it features old stone buildings that can date back as far as the 15th century, all crowded around main squares. And anyone will tell you there’s something different about how this island feels. It has a tumultuous history — it was once occupied by the Ottomans, and in 1822 Greeks took up arms against the Turks, leading to a massacre that killed nearly everyone on the island. But the island is best known for mastiha, or mastic, a flavored resin with health benefits that range from good teeth to the cure for cancer (depending on whom you ask). In fact, the southern half of the island has an economy built almost entirely on mastic harvesting; the villages with large concentrations of trees are known as masticochoria, or mastic towns.

I’d arrived in Chios around 10 p.m., and met my friend Artemis for dinner at a seaside taverna. She said that once we finished, we would head to a party happening all night in one of the villages. I assumed she meant a party at someone’s home, or perhaps a nighttime soiree on one of Chios’ many beautiful beaches.

Instead, we drove inland, to Pyrgi. It’s one of the largest villages in the masticochoria, with most residents involved in every step of mastic production, from growing the trees to harvesting the “tears,” or the drops of mastic that appear from cuts in the trunk, through to the painstaking cleaning process. Every building here is covered in xysta, black and white geometric shapes painted on the walls and the bottoms of the balconies. Tomatoes hang in strands to dry out by the doors, narrow alleys bend under tunnels, and there’s not a named street to be found.

Long tables lined the town square, and on a raised platform in the center, a band played traditional Greek music. All the tables were packed with people eating souvlaki, fried potatoes, and summer vegetables from nearby restaurants and souvlaki joints, drinking wine and beer and shouting over the music. Huge crowds of people, sometimes in pairs and sometimes in chains of three or more, danced in circles around the band, right in the heart of the square. These are traditional island dances, known as “nisiotika”, and Pyrgi even has its own, the purgousiko.

It seemed that the whole village, maybe even most of the island, had turned up for the festivities. The dancing area sometimes got so full that the circles moved in baby steps. There were kids with their parents, teenagers who traveled in moody clusters, and older Greeks who knew all the words and steps to all the songs. They shouted to each other, throwing napkins and flowers in the air over dancers, hugging and welcoming strangers and friends as they arrived.

I had done traditional Greek dancing before at places with live music, but it’s nothing like doing it under stars and sprawling trees, surrounded by an entire village of people who know each other. I stumbled over my feet, awkwardly slipping on the napkins that littered the floor, and every time I started to fall, someone on either side of me would haul me back up and into the circle. Eventually the group’s exceptional dancers stepped into the center of the square and showed off some fancy footwork in a solo that the entire village cheered for. The crowd didn’t start to thin until the sun began to rise, and by then, I felt that I was a part of this village. As I twirled around the square, holding hands with an older Greek woman on one side and Artemis on the other, I became part of the blur, barely recognizable as the tourist I was.

Do’s and Don’ts of a Greek Panigyri

• Don’t show up too early. This is a good general rule to follow for Greek nightlife: nothing picks up until midnight or later, and the panigyri is no exception.
• Don’t expect the panigyri to be advertised. You’ll have to ask around to find it, but that’s part of the fun.
• Do make sure you dance! You might think you have two left feet. You might be nervous to do this in front of an entire village. But there is absolutely nothing to be embarrassed ab out — everybody will be friendly, and they’ll help you figure it out.
• Do be polite to everyone. It’s a party, and people will definitely approach you, so be friendly. It’s not an exaggeration: the entire village will be there, and you will most likely run into these people again if you’re planning on staying in the area.

About the author: Katherine Whittaker is the former digital editor at SAVEUR Magazine. These days, she’s based in Athens, Greece, where she writes about food and culture. You can follow her Greek adventures on Instagram.