Putin offered a 36-hr ceasefire from Jan 6 for ‘Christmas’. Isn’t Christmas on Dec 25?

Dismissing the proposal as “hypocrisy”, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, accused the Russians of wanting to ceasefire to “stop the advances of our boys in Donbas and bring equipment, ammunition and mobilized troops closer to our positions”, according to a DW report.

Although Russia follows the Gregorian calendar, like India and most of the world, the country’s Orthodox Church still follows the Julian calendar and celebrates Christmas on January 7, which corresponds to December 25 on the Gregorian calendar.

The Indian Express looks at what these two calendars are, and why Orthodox Christians observe Jesus Christ’s birth in January.

The Gregorian and Julian calendars

The Gregorian calendar was brought into use by Pope Gregory XIII, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, in 1582, and is named after him. It is a solar dating system that reformed the Julian calendar, which had been established by the Roman emperor Julius Caesar in 45 BC.

Both the Gregorian and Julian calendars consider a solar year to comprise 365 and a quarter days. Both ‘intercalate’ or add one day every four years so that the calendars correspond to the seasons.

However, as the solar year more correctly comprises 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45.25 seconds, the dates of seasons in the Julian calendar regressed by almost one day per century.

The Gregorian system improved the Julian system by only considering those century years as leap years which are exactly divisible by 400 (eg. 1600, 2000).

When the Julian calendar was in force, much of Europe in medieval times regarded March 25 (Feast of the Annunciation), the day nine months before Christmas, as the beginning of the new year.

Orthodox Christians and the Julian calendar

Once Pope Gregory XIII announced the implementation of the new calendar, the Orthodox Church, one of the two largest denominations in Christianity, refused to follow it because it would have meant accepting the occasional overlap between Passover — a prominent Jewish holiday — and Easter, which holy texts of Orthodox Church didn’t allow.

The church continued relying on the same Julian calendar for centuries until 1923 when it decided to tweak it in order to address its discrepancy — by this time, there was a 13-day difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, putting Orthodox Christmas 13 days after December 25.

A conference was held in Constantinople that year which was attended by delegations from the churches of Constantinople, Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Russia, and Serbia. This led to the adoption of the Revised Julian calendar, a more accurate alternative to both Julian and Gregorian calendars, by several Orthodox Churches in countries like Greece, Cyprus, and Romania and they now celebrate Christmas on December 25.

However, the Orthodox Churches of Russia and Egypt refused to accept the changes and kept following the original Julian calendar. Therefore, they celebrate Christmas on January 7 as of now.