Moonwise

Julian Year 2004
with the Gregorian Calendar
Orthodox Christian Festivals

The Julian Calendar was instituted by Julius Caesar in Rome in the year now known as 46 BCE, and is the basis for the modern Gregorian Calendar used almost worldwide. As set up by Caesar, 25 March was to be the Spring Equinox. The year was to be 365 days long, with a leap year of 366 days every four years. It gradually came to be recognised that the year was slightly too long: about one day too many every 128 years, and the seasons were apparently starting earlier and earlier.

This was a particular problem for the dating of Easter: the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 CE had come up with a unified calculation for the date of Easter, based on defining the Equinox as 21 March, which was the usual date for it at that time. Of course, the Equinox stepped ever earlier, and by the sixteenth century usually fell on 11 March, while the Church was still celebrating Easter on the Sunday following the Full Moon on or after 21 March. Easter was wandering into the summer, and this was felt inappropriate. An even worse problem was that the table of dates of New Moons (and thus Full Moons) also relied on this inaccurate calendar, and New Moons began to be observed much earlier than the Church expected.

After a series of false starts, the calendar was reformed: leap years were to be suppressed in three out of four century years (1700, 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2500, etc), and a new and pretty accurate lunar calendar was devised: the system of Golden Numbers and Epacts that is the Gregorian Lunar Calendar. The new Gregorian Calendar was first used in 1582 by the Roman Catholic Church, and in some Catholic countries. Gradually the calendar spread throughout Europe and the world, being accepted eventually by Britain and its then colonies in 1752.

After the First World War, the revolutionary Soviet Union, along with newly liberated Greece and Yugoslavia at last adopted the Gregorian Calendar. The calendar was debated by the Orthodox Churches in 1923, at an Inter-Orthodox congress in Constantinople (now Istanbul). The Greek and Syrian Churches (‘New Calendarists’), among others, decided to use the new calendar, but continue to this day to celebrate Easter according to the old one. The Russian and Serbian Churches (‘Old Calendarists’) use the old calendar for everything, and so for instance currently celebrate Christmas on Gregorian 7 January, whereas the Greek Church celebrates it on Gregorian 25 December along with most of the rest of Christendom. So far, only the Finnish Orthodox Church has completely adopted the new calendar. See more about this in an article by Lewis Patsavos, and about proposals for a united date of Easter.

Here then are the Julian months along with Gregorian dates; Sundays and important religious festivals are shown, and also the Christian-related date Clean Monday that is a public holiday in Greece.

updated December 2004