The Twelve Great Feasts and the Calendar

What “Great Feast” means, and how the Twelve are ordered within the Church year: the fixed cycle keyed to the Menaion and the movable cycle keyed to Pascha; the year that begins on 1 September; and the structure of forefeast, feast, afterfeast, and leave-taking (apodosis) that gives every Great Feast its shape.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What “Great Feast” means

The Orthodox calendar ranks its commemorations by solemnity, and the highest rank below Pascha is the group traditionally numbered as twelve — the Dōdekaorton, the “Twelve-feast” (The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium [ODB], ed. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Feasts”). The rank is expressed liturgically: a Great Feast has a full festal Vigil, its own festal antiphons and entrance verse at the Liturgy, a proper Gospel and Epistle, and — the surest marker — a forefeast and afterfeast with a leave-taking, so that the feast is not a single day but a season (Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts,” in The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, Introduction). The number twelve is traditional and, in the strict sense, conventional: certain feasts of the very highest solemnity that fall outside the Twelve — the Circumcision, the Nativity and Beheading of the Forerunner, the feasts of Sts Peter and Paul — are “great feasts” in a looser sense, and the Russian Typikon marks them with the sign of the cross-in-a-semicircle; but the classical list of twelve is fixed by long usage (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga [Handbook for Church Servers], 2nd ed., 1900, on the ranking of feasts; ODB, s.v. “Feasts”).

The Twelve fall into two dogmatic classes. Feasts of the Lord (Despotikai heortai) celebrate events in the economy of the incarnate Word — the Nativity, Theophany, Meeting, Transfiguration, Entry into Jerusalem, Ascension, Pentecost, and the Exaltation of the Cross. Feasts of the Theotokos (Theomētorikai heortai) celebrate events in the life of the Mother of God — her Nativity, her Entrance into the Temple, the Annunciation, and her Dormition (ODB, s.v. “Feasts”; and see The Great Marian Feasts). The distinction is not merely descriptive: it governs precedence when feasts coincide, and it is why a feast of the Lord always outranks a feast of the Theotokos or a saint on the same day. The Meeting of the Lord is the instructive borderline case — Marian in its imagery and long treated in the West as the “Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” yet ranked in the Byzantine books as a feast of the Lord because its central figure is Christ presented in the Temple (ODB, s.v. “Hypapante”; see The Meeting of the Lord).

The year that begins in September

The Orthodox liturgical year begins not on 1 January but on 1 September, the Indiction — a starting-point inherited from the Byzantine fiscal calendar and fixed for the Church by long tradition (ODB, s.v. “Indiction”; The Festal Menaion, Introduction). This is why the first of the Great Feasts to fall in the year is the Nativity of the Theotokos on 8 September, and the last is her Dormition on 15 August. The result is a year framed by the Mother of God: it opens with her birth and closes with her repose, the whole cycle “enclosed within her life,” as the introduction to the Festal Menaion observes (Ware, Introduction; and see The Great Marian Feasts). It is a point of real theological weight that the year of the Lord’s feasts is set within the span of his Mother’s life on earth.

Two cycles: fixed and movable

The feasts are governed by two interlocking cycles. The fixed cycle (the menaion, “of the month”) assigns feasts to calendar dates that recur every year: the Nativity of Christ always on 25 December, Theophany on 6 January, the Transfiguration on 6 August, and so for nine of the Twelve. Their propers are printed month by month in the twelve-volume Menaion, of which the Festal Menaion is the selection for the great days (Ware, Introduction). The movable cycle (the Paschalion) governs the feasts whose date is computed from Pascha, and therefore shifts from year to year across a span of several weeks: Palm Sunday the Sunday before Pascha, the Ascension on the fortieth day after (always a Thursday), and Pentecost on the fiftieth day (always a Sunday). Their propers stand in the Triodion and the Pentecostarion, the books of the Paschal cycle, not in the Menaion — a placement that itself declares their dependence on Pascha (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1978; The Pentecostarion, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1990). The two cycles run simultaneously and are constantly combined by the Typikon, which prescribes how a fixed feast and a movable observance are served together when they coincide (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, on the concurrence of the menaion and triodion).

A note on dating is unavoidable. The nine fixed feasts fall on the same calendar date every year, but which civil date that is depends on the calendar a Church uses. Churches on the Julian (“Old”) calendar (the Russian, Serbian, Georgian, Jerusalem Churches, and Mount Athos) keep 25 December on what is now 7 January on the civil (Gregorian) calendar; Churches on the Revised Julian (“New”) calendar (Constantinople, most of Greece, Antioch, Alexandria, Romania, and others) keep the fixed feasts on the civil date. Pascha and the whole movable cycle, however, are still computed by nearly all Orthodox on the older Paschalion, which is why Orthodox Pascha usually differs from Western Easter (see Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar for the Paschalion and the calendar question in detail).

The shape of a feast: forefeast, afterfeast, leave-taking

A Great Feast is not a point but an extension. Around the feast-day the Typikon builds a period of anticipation and prolongation borrowed, in its logic, from the octave of Pascha (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, SVS Press, 1966, on the festal structure; Ware, Introduction).

• The forefeast (Greek proheortia, Slavonic predprazdnstvo) is a period of one or more days before the feast in which the hymnography begins to anticipate it. Most Great Feasts have a single day of forefeast; the Nativity of Christ has five (from 20 December), and Theophany has a forefeast of four, so that the two great feasts of the incarnation are approached across a longer runway (The Festal Menaion, propers of the forefeasts; ODB, s.v. “Feasts”). Three feasts have no forefeast — the movable Entry into Jerusalem, Ascension, and Pentecost, whose place in the Paschal cycle supplies their preparation otherwise.
• The feast-day itself, kept with Vigil and festal Liturgy.
• The afterfeast (metheortia, poprazdnstvo), a period of several days — most commonly running to the leave-taking — during which the feast’s hymns continue to be sung alongside the daily commemorations. Its length varies: the Meeting has an afterfeast of up to seven days, the Nativity of Christ a longer one, the Transfiguration through 13 August, and so on, each fixed by the Typikon (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; The Festal Menaion, propers).
• The leave-taking or apodosis (Slavonic otdanie), the last day of the afterfeast, kept with special solemnity — often with the full festal propers repeated — as a formal “sending-off” of the feast (ODB, s.v. “Apodosis”; The Festal Menaion, Introduction). The apodosis of a feast can fall long after the day itself: that of the Annunciation, for instance, is kept the day after the feast because of Lent, while that of the Dormition falls on 23 August.

This structure means that the Orthodox experience of a Great Feast is durative, not momentary: the Church does not merely mark the day and move on but dwells in the feast, “keeping” it across a season of forefeast and afterfeast until it is formally taken leave of. The theology is handled more fully in Hymnography and the Shape of a Feast; here it is enough to see that the calendar is not a list of dates but a rhythm of preparation, celebration, and prolongation, all of it ordered beneath the one Feast of Feasts.

See Also

• Pascha: The Feast of Feasts — the feast above the Twelve, from which the movable cycle is computed
• Hymnography and the Shape of a Feast — the forefeast/afterfeast structure as a liturgical form
• Fasting and Feasting — the fasts and fast-free periods that punctuate the festal year
• Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar — the Julian/Revised-Julian question and the Paschalion in full

References

• The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (Ware’s introduction on the ranking, structure, and framing of the Great Feasts; the propers of the fixed feasts and their forefeasts.)
• The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978.
• The Pentecostarion. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston, 1990.
• Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1966.
• The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (Articles: “Feasts,” “Indiction,” “Apodosis,” “Hypapante.”)
• Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga (Handbook for Church Servers). 2nd ed., 1900. (The ranking of feasts and the concurrence of the fixed and movable cycles.)