Hymns of Holy Week and the Resurrection Byzantine Music Days Festival

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Holy Week arrives in October at the Alternative Stage. On 23 October 2026 the programme is the hymns of Holy Week and the Resurrection — the chant of Greek Orthodox Easter — sung half a year out of its liturgical season, and that dislocation is the point. This is the third of four nights in «Ημέρες Βυζαντινής Μουσικής» (Days of Byzantine Music), and the four run in the order of the church year rather than the calendar: the Nativity hymns on the 21st, the Divine Liturgy on the 22nd, Holy Week and the Resurrection on the 23rd, and an all-night vigil on the 24th. So an October date for Easter chant is not a scheduling slip — it is the arc.

The series is curated by Zacharias Karounis, a cantor born in Pakia, Laconia in 1977, with a degree in Byzantine music from the Athens Conservatory and postgraduate study in Liturgics and Hymnology at the Theological School of Athens. He has worked with the National Theatre and with Hadjidakis's Orchestra of Colours, and sang alongside Domna Samiou, Giorgos Dalaras and Stavros Xarchakos. His brief for the festival is generational: he sets historic choirs and established protopsaltes beside younger voices and women's chanting ensembles — the last a deliberate widening of a tradition long carried by men.

Byzantine chant is monophonic and built on the ison, the held drone that one group of singers sustains while the melodic line turns above it. There is no harmony in the Western sense and no instruments — only voices, the text, and the modal system that shapes them. The Holy Week night moves through the music of the Passion toward the Resurrection, the year's emotional pivot rendered in melody that has changed little across centuries. The crowd is a mix of church cantors, early-music listeners, and people who grew up with these hymns and rarely hear them given a concert platform.

If you are expecting a choir in the Western oratorio sense — soloists, organ, four-part harmony — this is a different musical language altogether. But if you want the central repertoire of Orthodox chant taken seriously as concert music, sung by people who carry it as living practice, this is the night the cycle reaches its climax.

The evening sits within the Alternative Stage's tenth-anniversary season, the first the house has built as themed festivals rather than a flat calendar. The venue is the Greek National Opera's black box inside the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC / ΚΠΙΣΝ), a flexible room with telescopic seating reset for each production. Curtain is 20:30; tickets are through ticketservices.gr. The SNFCC is not served by the metro — take the free shuttle from central Athens, the coastal tram, or a bus, and leave margin for the walk in from the park.

Four nights walk the whole church year against the grain of the calendar; this is the one that carries it from the Cross to the empty tomb.