Clean Monday in Athens, 1800–1940

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This article discusses the transformations of the Clean Monday festival and its multiple meanings in Athens over a century and a half in the context of the growth of the city, the advance of modernity, the deepening of commodity relations, and secularization. The first day of the Lenten fast for Orthodox Christians formed part of carnival in terms of revelries, obscenity, and "magical thinking." Moreover, Clean Monday in Athens was a major open-air festivity in which commensality and dance validated communal ties. Various changes occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century: the celebrations were dispersed into the space around the city and loosened their ties to the urban community and Athenian identity; and modernity brought individualization, a reduction of the sacred and ritual element in favor of leisure, commercialization, and ultimately the de-carnavalization of the festival. Clean Monday did not decline but was eventually enriched with new meanings. Its links with folk culture were strengthened, as it was appropriated by various communities of internal migrants. Its association with a boys’ culture of amusements was reinforced by the spread of kite flying. Finally, the character of Clean Monday as a day of contact between the city’s inhabitants and nature and as a welcome to spring became dominant in the twentieth century and has remained so to this day.