The Church Year
In brief
The Orthodox Church keeps an annual cycle of feasts and fasts that begins on September 1 and turns, at its center, around Pascha. Two calendars interlock: a fixed cycle of dated feasts and daily saints, and a movable cycle that swings each year with the date of Pascha. Lived year after year, the cycle is the Church's way of keeping the whole work of Christ — and the whole company of His saints — permanently in front of her children.
A year that begins in September
The Orthodox church year begins on September 1 — the "Indiction," a name borrowed from the Roman Empire's civil and tax year, which began on that date. The choice made agricultural sense in the ancient world: September was the turn of the year, when the harvest was gathered and offered back to God — Israel's "feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year" (Exodus 23:16). Tradition adds a deeper reason: by tradition it was at the start of this month that Christ entered the synagogue at Nazareth and read Isaiah's words, "to preach the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:19), announcing that in Him every year is the year of God's favor.
September 1 is kept quietly — a blessing of the new year, not a great feast. The Church's real "new year's day" in liturgical weight is Pascha itself, from which the whole cycle takes its bearings.
Two interlocking cycles
The first cycle is fixed. Every calendar date carries its own commemorations — a page of saints for each day, gathered in the twelve volumes of the Menaion — and among these dated celebrations stand most of the Twelve Great Feasts, from the Nativity of the Theotokos on September 8 to her Dormition on August 15. This is the cycle that gives Orthodox Christians their name days and the daily rhythm of saints' commemorations.
The second cycle moves. Because Pascha falls on a different Sunday each year, everything tethered to it moves too: the pre-Lenten Sundays, Great Lent, Holy Week, Pascha itself, and the fifty days to Pentecost. This movable season has its own service books — the Lenten Triodion before Pascha and the Pentecostarion after — while the rest of the year runs on the Octoechos, the book of eight weekly tones whose Sundays are counted "after Pentecost" until Lent comes round again. The two cycles mesh every day of the year: a given Wednesday is at once, say, a fixed saint's day from the Menaion and a movable "Wednesday of the fourth week after Pentecost" in a particular tone (more on the two kinds of feasts).
Feasts and fasts together
The year alternates feasting and fasting the way land alternates harvest and plowing. Four fasting seasons prepare for four celebrations — Great Lent for Pascha, the Nativity Fast for Christmas, the Apostles' and Dormition fasts for their feasts in summer — alongside the weekly rhythm of Wednesday and Friday (why the Church fasts). After the greatest feasts come entirely fast-free weeks. Great feasts arrive with an escort: days of forefeast before, afterfeast following, and a leavetaking when the feast is sung once more in full. Nothing important is celebrated for only one day.
One practical note: Orthodox churches today differ over which civil calendar carries the fixed cycle — some use the new (revised Julian) calendar, on which HolyStudy's dates are given, and others keep the old Julian calendar, currently thirteen days behind (the calendar question has its own entry). The shape of the year, and almost universally the date of Pascha, remains common to all.
The center of the circle
The church year is not a museum calendar of anniversaries. Every feast is kept in the present tense — "today" is the word the hymns reach for — because what Christ has done is not locked in the past but opened to every generation. And every part of the year points to one center. As the Orthodox Church in America's catechism puts it, the real liturgical center of the annual cycle is the feast of the Resurrection: the fasts lead to it, the fifty days flow from it, every Sunday repeats it, and even Christmas and Theophany take their festal shape from it. To live the church year is simply to walk in a great circle around the empty tomb — "this is the day which the LORD hath made" (Psalm 118:24) — until the circle is no longer needed.