On the evening of Tuesday 23rd June 2026, Ermioni celebrated the annual festival of Saint John Klidonas.  This festival is described as the most pagan of the Greek calendar, originally celebrated by the ancient Greeks that built fires in honour of Zeus Klidonas, associated with prophetic signs and utterances, with the Romans honouring Pales, the deity of shepherds and flocks, with celebrants leaping flames in an act of purification.  The custom threaded its way through Byzantine and Ottoman-era Greece and arrived almost intact to the present day.  Saint John the Baptist, whose nativity falls on 24th June, absorbed the old rites without entirely replacing them.  However, due to its ancient pagan roots, the Orthodox church does not recognise or attend these evening festivities, which are enjoyed by those in attendance.

The annual festival drew a large crowd of locals and visitors alike, all eager to paricipate in a midsummer ritual whose origins predate Christianity by centuries, that seamlessly blends ancient pagan solstice celebrations with Christian folklore.  Saint John is believed to reveal a person's fate on this specific night.  Unmarried youths participate in this ancient Klidonas fortune-telling process, which traditionally uses 'silent water' and personal tokens placed in 'mystic pitches or urns' to humorously predict future marriages and romantic fortunes.  The word klidon itself comes from Homer, denoting a prophetic utterance or a sacred omen.

The ritual has two distinct aspects.  On the eve of the feast, unmarried young women collect what is called amilito nero, silent water, from a spring or well.  The carrier must make the journey without speaking a word, any sound was believed to break the water’s oracular charge and the whole process had to begin again.  Each girl places a small personal object, a ring, a thimble, a pendant, into a ceramic pitcher of this water, which is then sealed and left overnight somewhere open to the sky.  That night, tradition holds, the young women dream of the men they will marry.  The following morning the pitcher is opened and each object drawn out in turn while verses are improvised aloud, the crowd interpreting each couplet as a forecast for the girl whose token has just surfaced.  For their dreams to come true, the maidens smash the pitches on the floor and then dance around the burning fire.

The second aspect belongs to fire.  The founara, built in streets and squares across rural Greece, are fed with May Day wreaths that have decorated front doors since the first of the month.  Their burning is deliberate, a shedding of the past season, a cleansing before the year turns.  Young men were customarily the first to leap three times over the fire, with women and children following once the flames had died a little.  In earlier times, even sick animals were driven over the fires, believing the heat would cure them.