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indistinguishable days. Let us start with the day: in the Orthodox calendar (as
in the Western calendar on feast days; after the Vatican II reforms only on
Sundays and Solemnities) the day starts in the evening with the setting of the
sun—in Genesis each day is described as ‘evening and morning’, not ‘morning
and evening’—and moves towards the light of the morning; the day moves
from darkness to light, ultimately towards the ‘day without evening’ of the
Kingdom of Heaven. Then the week, which starts with Sunday, the Day of the
Resurrection; in Russian it is called Воскресение, ‘Resurrection’, in Greek,
Κυριακή, the Lord’s Day, as it has also been called in England—the Day, the
day of the Lord’s Resurrection. Moreover, the week also ends with Sunday, the
eighth day, coming full cycle on that day (the Orthodox lectionary of scriptural
readings, for example, is organized in terms of weeks that end on Sunday):
again pointing to the eighth day, the symbol of the ‘day without evening of the
Kingdom’ (ἀνέσπερος ἡμέρα τῆς βασιλείας). The sequence of the moons also
begins with the paschal full moon, and the various seasons of the year are
reflected in the festivals of the Church Year.
Easter is the central turning point in the Christian Year. It is preceded
by the great forty-day fast of Lent. There developed different ways of
interpreting this forty-day fast: in the West the forty days are counted back
from Holy Saturday, omitting Sundays, so that Lent begins on Ash Wednesday;
in the East the forty-day period begins on Clean Monday (two days before Ash
Wednesday, when Easters coincide) and ends on the weekend before Easter—
with Lazarus Saturday (commemorating the rising of Lazarus) and the Entry of
Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday ushering in Great and Holy Week.
Easter is followed by the fifty days leading up to Pentecost (which means
‘fiftieth [day]’), by way of the Feast of the Ascension, forty days after Easter. So
there is a period of nearly three months in the Christian Calendar determined
by the paschal full moon, and the dates connected with it are detached, as it
were, from the solar year of twelve months. For most of the year, the feasts and
fasts of the Church are determined by the solar year, but for the three months
from the beginning of Lent until the end of the Paschal season, they are
accompanied by a long period of fast and feast, based on the lunar year which
determines Easter.
The solar year itself, beginning in January and ending in December is
marked by various celebrations: first of all, the celebrations of the feasts of the
martyrs, generally on the date of their martyrdom, their ‘heavenly birthday’,
and later other saints. The Orthodox understanding of the Church Year is more
closely linked to the Roman Year than in the West, where the Church Year

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