The ritual which brings together all the visitors to the festival, no matter their age, sex or nationality, is the cooking of the spinach soup, or bourania, simmering in a huge cauldron under the watchful gaze of several elderly gentlemen with naughty smiles on their faces. Everyone who passes by must stop and stir the soup with a long wooden ladle of a particular shape, take a sip of soup straight from the ladle and then drink a shot of tsipouro from a ceramic phallic-shaped tumbler. After this ashes are smeared on the faces of the guests as a sign that they have undergone this procedure.

Next to the cauldron of bourania is something else which attracts flocks of laughing festivalgoers – the rocking throne in the shape of a phallus. Usually 'ridden' by grinning representatives of the male sex from 5 to 105 years old, the occasional woman consents to try it out.

The mass participation of women in the outrageous carnival in Tyrnavos is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Local people say that, up to the Second World War, the festival was exclusively a male preserve. Women stayed at home behind drawn curtains and only the boldest of them dared to peep out and see their fathers, husbands and sons having fun in such a Dionysian way.

Today many visitors come to the carnival with their children and without any obvious embarrassment buy them one of those lollipops.

The Greek Orthodox Church definitely disapproves of the carnival in Tyrnavos. Every year senior clergy try to ban the festivities, but to no avail. For one thing, the carnival is too much fun and, more importantly, it is older than Christianity itself.

The festival of the penis in Tyrnavos stems from one of the oldest documented celebrations of the rebirth of nature – the Dionysian festivities. The merry processions of inebriated maenads and sileni are frequent themes in Baroque art, but the celebrations in Antiquity were much more flamboyant.

Ironically, in the beginning they were reserved for women. The Days of Dionysus were perhaps the only days of the year when Greek women left their homes for reasons other than going to the market or to the town fountain. They threw off their clothes, let down their tresses and ran madly to some nearby grove or meadow. There, in an ecstatic trance, which they believed had been sent by Dionysus, they sang, drank and danced. They waved thyrsae in their hands – long rods with a cone at the end, which anthropologists believe actually symbolised penises. Sometimes the trance of the maenads became so intense that they might tear apart with their bare hands an animal or even a human being passing by.