Daylight saving time will begin in Greece and the rest of the European Union early on Sunday. At 03:00, Greeks will set their clocks to 04:00 as daylight saving time always goes into effect on the last Sunday of March.
Often referred to as simply ‘Daylight Savings’ or ‘summer time’, the change means that Greeks will lose an hour of sleep on Sunday but they will make better use of the daylight available.
Between March and October, an hour of daylight is borrowed from the morning and added to the end of the day. In modern society, this means saving a fraction on energy bills, and in Greece, the producer price is the highest in the EU, almost twice the EU average, according to the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.
First suggested by Benjamin Franklin back in 1784
Daylight saving time was introduced relatively recently, although it was first suggested by Benjamin Franklin back in 1784. He suggested that if we started our days earlier, when it’s lighter, then it would save on candles.
Fast forward to 1907, the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, published a leaflet entitled The Waste Of Daylight. As a keen golfer and horse rider, William Willett was eager to make the most of the daylight hours and campaigned for the rest of his life. Although his proposal was not a straightforward one; it involved moving the clocks forward by 80 minutes, in four separate increments of 20 minutes each Sunday at 2am.
It was Canada that became the first country to implement Daylight Saving Time, in 1908. The US followed suit in 1918. Only around seventy countries (of 195) worldwide use it. Japan, India and China, as well as most countries near the equator, do not.