Issue 7. Time and the Calendar

Calendar reforms can stir deep emotions, they are about far more than adjusting a date. In Ukraine, the 2023 shifts in the dates for Christmas and Easter served as a geopolitical marker. As in other secular states, the liturgical calendar underpins major public holidays: a historically-dominant faith shapes the choice of dates, and the state’s calendar applies even to those who are not religious, or who belong to other confessions. Across centuries, debates over calendars have been sites of political or social contestations. In this interview with theologian Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun, we explore the role of the calendar, past and present, and consider how liturgical time might help us understand the present.

In 2023, both the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church decided to switch to what is often called the “New Julian” calendar: using the Gregorian calendar for immovable feasts and the Eastern lunar calendar for movable feasts. That was followed by a law that was passed by the Verkhovna Rada and signed by president Zelensky. This is a significant change. Do you see this shift in calendar as a unifying move, a divisive move, or both? I'm thinking in terms of Ukrainian society, but also within global Orthodoxy.

This shift has a lot to do with identities, maybe more than with the idea of unity. First, the very term you used, Neo-Julian calendar, is a euphemism, because the Orthodox are reluctant to call their calendar by the name of a Roman pope, Gregory. That's why they prefer to call their calendar after the pagan Roman emperor Julian. So instead of saying it's Gregorian, they say it's Neo-Julian to emphasize that it's not so different from their original Julian calendar. The irony, however, is that they prefer a pagan emperor to the Roman pope. Whereas everyone else widely calls it the Gregorian calendar. So that's one identity thing related to the shift.

Another connection to the notion of identity is for Ukraine at large as a society and as a state. When the Ukrainian parliament adopted this law and embarked on this new calendar for its holidays, it was making a declaration. It was a declaration of Ukraine's affiliation with the West, that Ukraine goes to the West and leaves Russia behind. Russia stays with the Julian calendar.

In terms of the Church, before the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian empire followed the Julian calendar, while the rest of Europe followed the Gregorian calendar. It was a difference between states, between political systems as well – the Russian empire and the West. After the Bolshevik revolution, only the Church retained the old calendar, even though not completely consistently. Initially the Church decided to switch, under patriarch Tikhon, to the Gregorian calendar, but then they changed their mind and went back to the Julian calendar. The Russian Orthodox church still follows the Julian calendar very devotedly, which pushed Ukraine to seek to differentiate itself. Just another opportunity for Ukraine to differentiate itself from Russia by emphasizing the Gregorian calendar. So, it was a political statement. To borrow a term from Russian ideology, it was a civilizational statement by Ukraine, that it is departing from Russian civilization and the Russian world and joining the world of countries that follow the Gregorian calendar.

It is a matter of identity in many ways – politically, ecclesially, socially, culturally. At the same time, it does not help to preserve the integrity, the unity of the Ukrainian society and country to some extent. The Ukrainian Orthodox church, presumably in affiliation with the Moscow patriarchate, still follows the Julian calendar. Therefore, as we said in the beginning, we have two Christmases and two sets of all the so-called immovable feasts. For example, one feast which is important for Ukraine and which is very much celebrated is called Pokrova, or the Veil of the Theotokos. It is a state holiday because this is the day when the Ukrainian army is celebrated. It was held very dear by the Cossacks in the early modern period. Even this day, which is supposed to be a day of national unity, is celebrated twice, on October 1 (per the Gregorian calendar) and October 14 (per the Julian calendar). But it seems that identity remains more important even than unity for Ukraine. That's why they decided to switch to the Gregorian calendar.

But Ukraine has, in history, often been at the heart of calendar-related contestation. For example, if you think about the Union of Brest: it was important for the then newly-formed church's hierarchy to retain the Julian calendar. And we can also note the debates over the liturgical calendar in 19th century Galicia. What do you think about Ukraine's position in these European-wide discussions, when it comes to calendars as a marker of religious identity?

I do think the 19th-century Greek Catholic Church is key to answering this question. At the time, it was the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, which sought unity and conformity in all possible ways, including the calendar. This pattern of consolidation or unification of the Catholic Church, which was a feature especially around the time of Vatican I, affected the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, and more generally in the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that were inhabited by Greek Catholics and Orthodox. Rome really imposed this uniformity upon Eastern-rite Catholics, including the calendar.

The situation changed after Vatican II. The Catholic Church allowed much more diversity within itself and began to appreciate this diversity. I would say this is something that we need to embark on and learn from the Catholic Church after Vatican II in Ukraine. The fact that we celebrate two Christmases and other immovable feasts can contribute to disunity in Ukraine. But it can also enhance this diversity, which is a feature of Ukraine. I believe diversity is very important for Ukraine. It's embedded, it's intrinsic to Ukraine, even in terms of religious life.

Moreover, as a borderland, Ukraine has always embraced and encompassed different cultures and traditions. Take only Galicia, and Galicia is just a part of Ukraine. We can consider, and I think we should consider, this diversity of calendars as a blessing, because it reflects and highlights the diversity of our culture, of our country. That's why I believe it's good to celebrate Christmas twice a year, to celebrate the Veil of the Theotokos twice a year, and to have many confessions in Ukraine. It's really a blessing, and we should acknowledge it.

The calendar is one of many places where church and state meet. I was thinking about the ways in which the state and the church may have different priorities and logics. The church is primarily concerned with the spiritual wellbeing of its flock. The state has its own motivations. In the 19th century, the Habsburgs wanted fewer holidays in Galicia so that the peasants would work more. That's still to a certain degree the case today – there are economic pressures. Look at the news and you see France dealing with a big budget deficit, and one of the proposals to address it is to cut two of the religious holidays. States have this logic of wanting to streamline and maximize economic capacity. I suppose there could be that impetus to Ukraine's move here as well – it reduces the holiday window from December 25 to January 1 rather than December 25 to January 7. But the political imperative seems to outweigh the economic in this case. We have a state leader who is acting as part of a larger effort to liberate Ukrainian Orthodoxy from Russian control. How do you understand these different processes?

I agree. Those dimensions, political and social, are important. They attach to the issue of the calendar, even though the calendar seems to be a religious matter. Ukraine is not like France. We don't have this concept of laïcité. France is not exactly secular. They have laïcité, which is different from secularism, even the Scandinavian sort of secularism. And, of course, even in Scandinavia, which is very secular, religious holidays are observed. Like, for example, the lovely holiday of Santa Lucia, which is so beautiful and very cultural nowadays but has very strong religious roots going back to Italy, to Sicily. Very strange for Scandinavia.

At any rate, I don't know if the economic reasons are really reasons or pretexts to cut some of the holidays in the framework of policies towards secularization. In the case of Ukraine, we are not talking about a policy of secularization. Ukraine has many other concerns. Secularization is one of the least important concerns nowadays. Moreover, Ukrainians need support, which is not necessarily material or financial, but which is moral, even religious. The state understands that and tries to provide help, even psychological help, mental help to Ukrainians by offering holidays and things that may help people to survive this war. Maybe in the next phase the Ukrainian state will begin cutting those holidays and diminishing their significance, but so far it's moving in the opposite direction.

Many things have to be taken into consideration in addition to economic reasons. The issue of mental health is tremendous, particularly in Ukraine. Certainly religion helps with it. The churches help and contribute to the mental health of society. And holidays help.

I wonder if we could come back to this question of the state framing the move, whether this calendar shift or others, explicitly as a move away from and to liberate Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Ukrainian society from Russian control. This framing is quite explicit. How do you understand that?

Russia has instrumentalized religion in its war, and has made religion one of its weapons. It's a form of soft power that sometimes turns into hard power. Ukraine does the opposite. It tries to neutralize this weapon, just as it tries to neutralize other weapons that Russia sends to Ukraine – trying to cut ties with the spiritual traditions of Moscow as much as possible. It's not easy. I doubt that it is possible to do so completely. But they try, and this is exactly what the policies of the Ukrainian state to sever relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with the Moscow Patriarchate are directed towards. It has been half successful, I would say. They have achieved some success, but not complete success so far.

Speaking about the calendar, it fits this framework of “de-Muscovitizing” Ukrainian Orthodoxy as much as possible. The calendar is one of the relevant issues; that's why they, and by they I mean also the state, decided to switch to the new calendar. So it's part of the policies of severing ties, cultural ties and disabling the soft power of Moscow.

I'm thinking about the ways in which a liturgical calendar gestures towards an underlying sense of time and of how an institution or a society thinks about time. When you speak of the Russian Orthodox Church and its weaponization of religion, I am reminded also of Timothy Snyder's formulation of the “politics of eternity” and the ways in which Russian ideology epitomizes that mode of thinking. How do you think about these politics of eternity, how do you think about time on this grander scale, including within political theology?

That's a great question, and it's a difficult one. It has to do with theology and philosophy of time. In the case of Ukraine, time has a very particular framing. This framing is conditioned by the war. We are in the time after the big invasion and before the end of the war. We live in a sort of limbo, framed by those two bookends of time, two points: February 24th, 2022 at one end, and at the other we don't yet know the date when the war will end. We wait, we aspire almost in eschatological terms for the end of the war. We don't yet know what will be in the aftermath, in the afterlife, as it were. The most important thing for us is to reach that date and to live until that date. So time is framed by those two points.

Even the calendar changes are framed by this idea of time, because we want to depart from Moscow, and time helps us to do so, at least so we believe. Of course, the church is supposed to think in other terms, beyond those frames. Even though the church is part of a society which is at war, and it is affected by the war, it is called to stand beyond the agenda of the war. I hope the churches in Ukraine, all churches – and I mean not just Orthodox, as there is a variety of religious groups and traditions in Ukraine – try to think in larger terms.

I hope the church can still think in terms that are not global, they are more than global. They are metaphysical, they are transcendental, they go beyond the frameworks of this world, which helps Ukraine as well. If we are focused completely on the war, if we are fixated on the war, if we are fixated on this timeframe between February 2022 and some date in the hopefully near future, then we can be consumed by this time, we can be absorbed by this time, and we should not be. The church, with this metaphysical transcendental vision dimension, is supposed to help us liberate ourselves from this timeframe, to see beyond the war.

Sometimes we can call it hope; we can call it faith. We believe in our victory, eventual victory, maybe not an immediate one, but an eventual one. I call it the long victory. We will probably not easily achieve the short victory, but we need to aspire for the long victory. This long victory is something which is important for Christianity as well, because Christianity is also about the long victory. It's not about immediate victories. This message can be helpful for Ukrainian society, which is tormented by this war. All these philosophical ideas, which might seem abstract and maybe not particularly relevant to a country tormented by war, can be a tremendous help to a war-affected society.

There's also a certain comfort that can be gained from thinking about the church as a long-lasting institution, looking back millennia even, and thinking about this tradition and the history that is behind it. What relevance do you think looking back to, say, the first millennium can have for us today?

Well, for one thing, all those calendars emerged in the first millennium. This year, 2025, by the way, is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which established the unified date of Easter. Calendar reforms in the church, really large scale reforms, started in the year 325 at the initiative of Emperor Constantine.

This was a very Roman thing, because for the Roman Empire, even before Christianity, when it was still a pagan empire, a unified calendar was of crucial importance. It was one of those features that cemented the unity of the empire, that helped facilitate the integrity of the empire, together with the road network or the administrative bureaucratic system. A calendar was one key element, and that's why Constantine, even though he was not exactly 100% Christian at the time of Nicaea, understood very well as a Roman and as a political leader that one single calendar is important for the unity of the empire and for the unity of the church.

It was in the fourth century that all those ideas that are still important and relevant to us were first raised. They are still being worked on: for example, there is a huge effort between the Orthodox and the Catholics to celebrate Easter on the same date. All of the recent popes have supported this. Pope Francis emphasized that it was very important. Pope Leo has confirmed that it is also important to him. Patriarch Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch, also promotes this idea among the Orthodox, sometimes hopelessly. He is one of very few primates who stand for this idea, but he believes, and I completely agree with him, that it would be important to celebrate Easter together. This was an initiative that was promulgated in the fourth century at the Council of Nicaea, then confirmed by the later councils.

I have one final question, a little bit more personal. All of these changes are happening, and we are speaking, amidst the very specific circumstances of full-scale, all-consuming war. This can cause, as you were saying, a certain disorientation in time and a sense of being in limbo. Do you still feel the annual rhythms of the liturgical calendar? Are these among the orienting points in your life?

I believe so. All Christian traditions have annual circles, liturgical cycles, and people in those traditions live according to those circles. We are accustomed to that. In Ukraine, we have also a slight modification of those circles. Now we count those circles from February 24. This coming year it will be the fourth time. It's like a landmark for us before the new cycle begins.

Our perception of time is cyclical, no doubt, even though those cycles can be modified; they change and shift. I would say that even the shift of the Easter cycle and the Christmas cycle that you mentioned in the very beginning of our conversation, is a result of this cycle which begins on February 24, because this war created momentum for the change in the liturgical calendar. So that's an illustration of how the different cycles, political, social and ecclesial, are intertwined in Ukraine because of the war.

It's a complex canvas, as it were. It's conditioned by the war, but we can still make sense of it. And I think it also gives us some hope that because it is cyclical, it's not the end of history. It's not the end of the story. It's just the beginning of a new cycle. That's the thing which is hopeful.