The year turns on Pascha. Everything below either stays put on the calendar or counts its days from Pascha. The Church Year explains how the pieces fit; this page is the table you pin to the fridge.
The Feast of Feasts
| Feast | Date | Where to read more |
|---|---|---|
| Pascha (Easter, the Resurrection) | Movable: a Sunday in spring, reckoned on the Julian Paschalion, so it usually falls later than Western Easter and sometimes on the same day | Holy Week and Pascha; Why Is Orthodox Easter on a Different Date? |
Hapgood's service book sets Pascha above the twelve Great Feasts and calls it "The Feast of Feasts."1 Its date follows the rule of the first Sunday after the full moon on or after March 21, with the moon and the equinox reckoned by the old tables.2
The fixed Great Feasts
| Feast | Date | Where to read more |
|---|---|---|
| Nativity of the Theotokos | September 8 | The Church Year |
| Elevation of the Cross | September 14 | The Church Year; Fasting (it's a fast day) |
| Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple | November 21 | The Church Year |
| Nativity of Christ | December 25 | The Church Year |
| Theophany | January 6 | Blessings: Water, Homes, and Things |
| Meeting of the Lord | February 2 | The Church Year |
| Annunciation | March 25 | The Iconostasis and Its Doors; Other Services You'll Meet |
| Transfiguration | August 6 | Blessings: Water, Homes, and Things (the grapes) |
| Dormition of the Theotokos | August 15 | Mary and the Saints |
Hapgood calls the Elevation the Exaltation of the Cross and the Entry the Presentation of the Theotokos in the Temple; the dates are the same.3
The movable Great Feasts
| Feast | When | Where to read more |
|---|---|---|
| Entrance into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday) | The Sunday before Pascha | Holy Week and Pascha |
| Ascension | The fortieth day of Pascha, always a Thursday | The Church Year |
| Pentecost | The fiftieth day, a Sunday; Hapgood's book calls it Trinity Sunday and keeps the next day as the Day of the Holy Spirit | The Church Year |
Count Pascha itself as the first day and the arithmetic works: Ascension falls on the Thursday after the sixth Sunday of Pascha, and Pentecost ten days after that.4
The fasting seasons
| Fast | Begins | Ends |
|---|---|---|
| Great Lent | Clean Monday, seven weeks before Pascha | The Forty Days end on the Friday before Lazarus Saturday; the fast of Holy Week runs from Monday of Holy Week to Pascha |
| The Apostles' Fast | The Monday after the Sunday of All Saints (the Sunday after Pentecost) | The feast of Saints Peter and Paul, June 29 |
| The Dormition Fast | August 1 | August 14, the eve of the Dormition |
| The Nativity Fast | November 15 | December 24, the eve of Christmas |
Great Lent and Holy Week together run forty-eight days.5 The Apostles' Fast has no fixed length: it starts from Pentecost and stops on a fixed date, so a late Pascha shortens it.6 The Dormition and Nativity Fasts never move.7
On top of the seasons, every Wednesday and Friday is a fast day, except in the fast-free weeks: Christmas to the eve of Theophany, the week after the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, Bright Week after Pascha, and the week after Pentecost. Three single days are fasts as well: the Elevation of the Cross (September 14), the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (August 29), and the eve of Theophany (January 5).8 Fasting: The Rules, the Range, and the Point has what the fasts ask of you.
Two calendars
The dates above are the Church's dates. Churches on the Revised Julian calendar keep the fixed feasts on those days of the civil calendar; churches on the Julian calendar keep them thirteen days later on the civil calendar (from 1900 to 2099), so their Christmas is January 7. Nearly everyone keeps the same Pascha, and so the same movable feasts.9 Why Is Orthodox Easter on a Different Date? tells the whole story.
Notes
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Hapgood, Service Book, p. xiii. ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, p. xix. ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, p. xiii. ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, pp. xiii, xvii. ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, pp. xiv–xvi; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, "Did You Know? Clean Monday." ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, p. xvi; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, "Religious Calendar: History and Development," gives the same span and ends the fast on June 28, the eve of the feast. ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, p. xvii; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, "Religious Calendar: History and Development." ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, p. xvii. ↩
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Hapgood, Service Book, pp. xiii, xix; OrthodoxWiki, "Julian Calendar" (the gap grows by a day in 2100). Hapgood dates the thirteen-day gap from March 1, 1901; it actually opened in March 1900, because 1900 was a leap year on the Julian calendar and not on the Gregorian (Gregory XIII, Inter gravissimas, 1582). ↩