How a Greek Open-Air Cinema Actually Works

We have written before about where to find Crete's open-air cinemas. This is the other half: what actually happens when you get there, because a therino runs on conventions nobody explains to visitors and the first-timer questions are always the same.

Most of what follows is drawn from Athens guides, where the tradition is best documented. Crete's screens are smaller and more informal, so treat the details as the pattern rather than the rule, and check the board outside.

The question everyone asks first

Films are shown in their original language with Greek subtitles. They are not dubbed.

So an English-language film is in English, with Greek text along the bottom that you can simply ignore. This is the single most useful thing a visitor can know, and it is why an open-air cinema in Greece is genuinely available to you in a way it would not be in France or Italy or Spain.

The exception is children's animation, which is sometimes dubbed into Greek for obvious reasons. If you are taking small children, ask.

Times, and why they move

Screenings start when it gets dark, which means roughly 21:00 to 22:00 in high summer and earlier as the season turns. The projector cannot beat the sun.

For reference, sunset in eastern Crete falls at about 20:22 on 1 August, 19:46 on 1 September, 19:04 on 30 September and 18:44 on 15 October — and you need another twenty-five to thirty minutes of fading light after that before anything is properly watchable. A late-August screening starting at half nine is a September screening starting at half eight.

Some venues run a second, later showing. Others do not. The board outside is the authority, and it changes weekly.

Tickets, and just turning up

Expect somewhere around €8–12. You buy on the door. For the great majority of screenings you turn up twenty to thirty minutes beforehand and there is space; only the famous Athens venues genuinely need booking on a summer weekend, and Crete's are not those.

The interval is real, and it is not an interruption

There is an intermission in the middle of the film. This surprises people who assume it is a projector-changing relic, and it is — a survival from the days of reel changes — but it has quietly become the point.

You get up, you buy another beer, you talk about the film so far. It is the most sociable ten minutes in cinema and it explains why Greeks go to the pictures in groups when they could stream the same film at home.

Drinks, cats, jasmine

Nearly all of them serve cold beer, wine, soft drinks and something to eat. Service continues during the film and nobody is shushed for opening a bag.

There will be cats. They will walk across the seating with total confidence and sit wherever they like, including on you. There will very often be jasmine planted along the walls, which comes into its own at about ten o'clock. The chairs are canvas director's chairs and they are more comfortable than they look.

If this all sounds insufficiently reverent about the film, that is correct. You are not there in silence. That is the difference between a therino and a multiplex, and it is entirely the appeal — as we set out in the longer history of Greece's open-air cinemas.

The season ends sooner than you think

Roughly late April to mid-October, with everything at full tilt from June to August. In Crete, several close earlier than that, and a wet week in October can end a season overnight.

If you are here in late September or October and there is a screen still running near you, go this week rather than next.

And now the part where we tell you to go there instead

If there is a working therino within a reasonable drive of where you are staying, go to it rather than booking us. For twenty or thirty euros, two of you get a genuine piece of Greek culture that has been running since the 1950s, with better cats than we can provide.

We are not competing with that and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. Our version costs a great deal more and it buys something different: your own terrace, your own film, your own guest list, and nobody else's conversation during the quiet part.

That is worth it for a proposal, a birthday, a group of fourteen who cannot easily all get to a cinema, or a villa in the hills where the nearest screen is fifty minutes each way and somebody has to drive. Starlight for Two is €690. A therino is €10. They are not the same purchase and we would rather you knew that before you enquired.

If your villa is somewhere a therino cannot reach and you want your own, tell us where you are.