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Friday Fun Thread for June 21, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I’d known intellectually the Russian orthodox calendar was different, but golly that’s more different than I thought.

Pascha was maximally different (5 weeks) this year; thus, so was Pentecost. Next year it will coincide with the western calendar, though.

While all Orthodox use the old calculation for Pascha (ok, ok, not the Finns for complicated historical reasons), somewhat confusingly, different Orthodox jurisdictions differ in whether they use the Julian or Revised Julian (identical to Gregorian for most of the next millennium) calendar for all the fixed dates.

The Russian church (and a few others) continues to use the Julian calendar for everything; thus the feast of Sts Peter and Paul, being June 29, is then July 12 in the Gregorian calendar.

It's not all that complicated, it was an expection permitted by Constantinople to allow the Finnish church to survive in the immediate volatile post-independence atmosphere and, as is the case with expections that have been in force for 100 years, has basically ossified to become a part of the local tradition. There was an initiative to "return" the Finnish Orthodox Church to the usual New Calendar Pascha schedule in the last general church assembly but it didn't go anywhere yet, we'll see if this changes if (as is probable) the hegumen of New Valaam monastery, who made the initiative, becomes a bishop at some point.