Finland and Greece sit at opposite ends of the same seasonal argument. One country gets a fortnight of near-total darkness in the north and about six hours of dim daylight in the south; the other gets 14 hours of hard sun in July. The traffic between them follows from that, and this page is about the pattern rather than a sales pitch.
Kaamos
The Finnish word for the polar night, the weeks around the solstice when the sun does not rise above the horizon in Lapland at all. Even in Helsinki, far to the south, midwinter days run about six hours and much of that is grey.
The cultural response is well documented: light therapy lamps in offices, vitamin D as a matter of routine, and a national appetite for a week somewhere with a sun in it. Greece is one of the main answers, along with the Canaries and Thailand.
The July concentration
Finnish summer holidays cluster tightly into July, when a large part of the workforce is off at the same time. That produces a very sharp peak in charter capacity to Rhodes, Crete, Kos and Corfu, and correspondingly high prices in exactly those weeks.
Anyone with flexibility should look at late May, early June or September instead. The sea is warmest in September, the crowds are gone, and the fares fall noticeably.
The Finnish presence in Greece
It is older than the charter boom. There has been a Finnish seasonal community on Rhodes and in Crete for decades, with Finnish-language services, doctors and schools in a few resort towns, and a steady trickle of retirees wintering in the south of the country to avoid the darkness entirely.
That community is one reason Finnish visitors often report Greece feeling unusually easy to travel in compared with its reputation for bureaucracy.
Adjusting on arrival
- The clock. Greek dinner starts at 9.30pm. Nothing before 8pm has any social life at all.
- The heat. Midday in July on a Greek island is not walking weather. The local pattern of a long afternoon indoors exists for a reason.
- Cash. Still expected in taxis and small tavernas, which is a jolt coming from Finland.
- Ferries. The meltemi cancels sailings at short notice. Leave a day of margin before a flight home.
Where we work
Athens and Mykonos, and nowhere else. We have no operation in Finland, no partner there, and nothing available outside those two Greek locations. This page’s address implies otherwise and that was never true.
For the capital, see Athens. For the island in season, Mykonos.
