Greeks celebrated Epiphany on Friday with blessing-of-the-water ceremonies across the country.
The holiday is known as Three Kings Day for Catholics and the Baptism of Christ for Orthodox. Greece is predominantly Orthodox.
Unusually warm weather helped gather crowds for outdoor celebrations, with swimmers competing with each other to grab a floating cross thrown by priests into seas, rivers or lakes. Retrieving the cross is believed to confer a special blessing on the person who retrieves it.
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In 2021, the celebrations had been severely affected by the restrictions imposed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic; last year, celebrations were canceled or curtailed in many parts of Greece as the country grappled with a sharp rise in COVID-19 infections.
A woman kisses the cross during an Epiphany ceremony in a port suburb of Piraeus, near Athens, Greece, on January 6, 2023.
(AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)
In the port of Piraeus, a cross is traditionally thrown three times to accommodate the crowd of bathers.
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In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, the man who recovered the cross told the media he had been trying to do so since 1996, failing only twice.
