Nobody in Athens publishes a Greek holiday list for 2025 the way Tokyo or Taipei publishes theirs. The dates are set by standing law. The backbone is paragraph 11 of Article 1 of the decree-law of 29 December 1980, ratified as Article 1 of Law 1157/1981 (Official Gazette A 126/12.5.1981), which names the national commemorations, the movable feasts counted from Pascha, and Sundays. Two later statutes extended the private-sector list: Article 14 of Law 4468/2017 made 1 May a compulsory holiday and Article 42 of Law 4554/2018 did the same for 26 December. Article 60 of Law 4808/2021 (Official Gazette A 101/19.6.2021) then gathered the compulsory closure days for “all businesses” into one provision, kept the rule that the Labour Minister may declare up to five further feasts a year once the advisory body has advised and the decision is published, and left regional holidays to the regional governors.

The tier that decides pay is narrower than the tier that closes the country. Nine of the thirteen dates on this page are compulsory closure days for all businesses: 1 and 6 January, 25 March, Easter Monday, 1 May, 15 August, 28 October, and 25 and 26 December. The other four — Clean Monday, Good Friday, Pascha Sunday and Whit Monday — are general days of rest in the 1980 framework: government, schools and banks stop, and in practice retail does too, but a private employee’s pay runs through the applicable collective agreement rather than Article 60. Read the agreement before assuming the money, and treat those four as days the country closes rather than days the labour code enumerates.

Greece lives on a hybrid calendar. Fixed feasts — Christmas on December 25, the Epiphany on January 6, the Dormition on August 15 — follow the Gregorian calendar the Greek state adopted in 1923, so on those dates Athens, London and Berlin agree. Pascha does not: the Orthodox churches compute it from the Julian paschalion, tied to the Julian date of the vernal equinox (currently 13 April) and to their own paschal full moon, and they keep their own answer even when it matches the Gregorian one. That is why Greek and Western Easter Monday fall on different days in most years — seven days apart in 2026, five weeks apart in 2027 — and coincide only occasionally. 2025 is one of those years: both traditions put Pascha on April 20, so Good Friday and Easter Monday mean the same dates in Athens and in London, and the Greek islands fill up accordingly.

The practical consequence: never copy an Easter-derived date from one country to another. Greece’s four movable holidays — Clean Monday (Pascha minus 48), Good Friday (minus 2), Pascha itself, and Whit Monday (plus 50) — are computed in Athens, and the offsets are what make the arithmetic checkable: Clean Monday and Whit Monday are always Mondays, Good Friday is always a Friday. In 2025 they land on March 3, April 18, April 20 and June 9. The other nine dates are fixed on the calendar and need no computation, which is why this page and the ICS, CSV and PDF files behind its download buttons can carry 2025 through 2028 as confirmed data.

March 25 is the strangest of the three, because it really is two holidays in one: the Annunciation is a liturgical feast, and 25 March is also the day the 1821 revolution is deemed to have begun. October 28 — Ochi Day — marks the refusal of the Italian ultimatum in 1940 and carries the heavier state ceremony: the parade in Thessaloniki, closures everywhere, and a much more formal tone than the church-and-lamb atmosphere of the spring feasts. August 15, the Dormition, is less a state occasion than the hinge of the Greek summer, with the Tinos pilgrimage and the village panigiri, and it is the week island hotels peak.

If you are scheduling work rather than travel, treat the spring block as the year’s real interruption: Good Friday and Easter Monday take two working days out of every Greek organisation at once, and companies that deal with Athens clients or Greek suppliers should expect a dead week around it. August 15 does the same job in summer, and on 28 October public services close even though the day is often a midweek one. The ICS file behind the download buttons on this page contains exactly the thirteen dates above and nothing else — no eves, no optional fast days, no sector-specific feasts such as the Teachers’ Three Hierarchs day on January 30, which closes schools but not offices.