The Feasts across the Orthodox World

The Twelve Great Feasts are a common inheritance of all the Orthodox Churches, celebrated from the same liturgical books; yet each people has clothed them in its own customs, folk-names, and local rites. This file surveys the reception of the feasts across the Orthodox world — the blessings of water, fruit, and branch, the folk-names and seasonal customs — and offers a sober assessment of what in that reception is doctrine, what is discipline, and what is inherited custom.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

One calendar, many customs

Every canonical Orthodox Church keeps the same Twelve Great Feasts from the same Menaion, Triodion, and Pentecostarion, so that a Greek, a Russian, a Georgian, a Serb, an Arab, and a Romanian sing substantially the same hymns on the same days. But two variables produce great diversity in how the feasts are lived. The first is the calendar: Churches on the Julian (“Old”) calendar (Russia, Serbia, Georgia, Jerusalem, and Mount Athos) keep the fixed feasts thirteen days later on the civil calendar than Churches on the Revised Julian (“New”) calendar (Constantinople, Greece, Antioch, Alexandria, Romania, Bulgaria), so that, for instance, the Nativity of Christ falls on the civil 25 December for some and 7 January for others — while nearly all keep Pascha and the movable feasts by the older Paschalion (and see The Twelve Great Feasts and the Calendar, and Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar). The second is local custom: the folk observances, blessings, and seasonal associations that each Orthodox culture has grown around the feasts (and see Orthodoxy: World Orthodoxy).

The blessings: water, fruit, and branch

Several of the feasts carry material blessings, and these are among the most widely loved and locally colored observances.

Theophany and the waters. The Great Blessing of the Waters on 6 January is universal, but its outdoor forms vary strikingly. In Greece, coastal Bulgaria, and among many diaspora communities the priest casts a cross into the sea, river, or harbor, and young men dive to retrieve it — the recoverer receiving a special blessing; in Russia and Ukraine the faithful cut a cross-shaped hole (the Iordan) in the ice of a frozen river and some plunge into the freezing water (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the blessing of the waters; and see Theophany). The blessed “Theophany water” is carried home everywhere and kept through the year.
The Transfiguration and the fruits. The blessing of the first fruits on 6 August takes the form of grapes and the new vintage in the Mediterranean and Georgian lands, and of apples in the Russian north, giving the Russian folk-name Yablochnyi Spas, “the Apple Saviour” (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; and see The Transfiguration). Russian piety strings together three August “Saviour” feasts — the Honey Saviour (1 August), the Apple Saviour (Transfiguration), and the Nut/Cloth Saviour (16 August) — folding the Dormition Fast into a harvest cycle.
Palm Sunday and the branch. Palm and olive are blessed and carried in the lands where they grow; in the Slavic north, where they do not, pussy-willow (verba) is used, giving the Russian name for the feast, Verbnoe Voskresenie, “Willow Sunday” — the willow, first to bud in the northern spring, standing in for the palm (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; and see The Entry into Jerusalem).
Pentecost and the greenery. At Pentecost churches and homes across the Slavic world are decked with fresh birch branches, grasses, and flowers, and the day is called Troitsa, “Trinity”; the greenery signifies the life-giving Spirit and the renewal of creation (and see Pentecost).

Local intensities and dedications

Different feasts loom largest in different Orthodox cultures. The Dormition is kept with extraordinary solemnity in the Greek world, where 15 August (the Dekapentavgousto) is among the greatest days of the year, marked by great pilgrimages — above all to Tinos and to Panagia Soumela — and by the “Burial of the Theotokos” service with its embroidered shroud (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, on the rite; and see The Dormition). The Georgian Church keeps its own beloved cluster of national commemorations alongside the universal Twelve, its festal life bound to the memory of St Nina and the conversion of Iberia (see St. Nina of Georgia). The Antiochian (Arab) tradition, heir to the ancient Church of Jerusalem and Antioch where several of the feasts were first observed, preserves the feasts in Arabic and Byzantine chant. The Armenian Church, non-Chalcedonian and thus outside the strict count of “Orthodox” treated here, is notable for preserving the ancient unified Theophany on 6 January, never having adopted the separate 25 December Nativity — a living witness to the older shape of the calendar (Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed., Collegeville, 1991, pp. 141–147; and see Theophany).

The feasts in the diaspora

The spread of Orthodoxy beyond its historic lands has put the reception of the feasts under a new kind of pressure and given it a new creativity. In Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Africa, Orthodox communities keep the Twelve amid civil calendars and workweeks that do not stop for them: the Nativity of Christ on the Julian 7 January, or the Dormition on a weekday in August, must be kept by a laity at work, so that great-feast Vigils are often moved to the nearest convenient evening and the outdoor rites (the Theophany blessing of waters, the Palm Sunday procession) are adapted to local conditions (see Orthodoxy: World Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy: Orthodoxy in America). The diaspora has also been the setting for the calendar question at its sharpest, since parishes of Old- and New-calendar jurisdictions may stand in the same city keeping the fixed feasts thirteen days apart. Yet the same conditions have clarified what is essential: stripped of the surrounding folk culture that carried the feasts in the old countries, diaspora Orthodoxy has had to rediscover the feasts in their liturgical substance — the hymn, the icon, the Eucharist — rather than in the seasonal custom, which is precisely the distinction this file presses.

A sober assessment: dogma, discipline, and custom

The variety is real, and it invites a distinction the tradition itself makes. Three layers must be told apart.

First, the dogmatic content of the feasts — the Incarnation confessed at the Nativity, the Trinity at Theophany, the uncreated Light at the Transfiguration — is common to all Orthodox and does not vary; it is the faith the councils defined, sung in the feasts (and see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). Second, the liturgical discipline — the fasts, the rank of the feasts, the structure of forefeast and afterfeast — is likewise substantially common, though it varies at the edges (the calendar difference, local Typikon usages). Third, the folk customs — the diving for the cross, the willow and the apples, the blessing of graves and fields — are inherited practices of piety, some of them ancient, some absorbing older seasonal and pre-Christian observances (harvest rites, spring and midsummer customs) that the Church baptized and reoriented to Christ. These customs are cherished, but they are not doctrine, and Orthodox writers have generally been careful to say so: the substance of a feast is what the Church confesses and celebrates in her services, not the local custom that has grown around it, however beloved (this is the ordinary teaching of Orthodox catechesis on the relation of feast and folk-custom; cf. Ware, The Orthodox Church, rev. ed., Penguin, 1993, on liturgy, national custom, and the danger of confusing the two). The honest assessment, then, is that the Orthodox world celebrates one set of feasts with one theology in a great diversity of dress — and that the diversity is a richness so long as the custom serves the feast and does not displace it.

References

Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga (Handbook for Church Servers). 2nd ed., 1900. (The blessings of water, fruit, and branch; local rubrics.)
Thomas J. Talley. The Origins of the Liturgical Year. 2nd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991. (The Armenian unified Theophany and the shape of the calendar.)
Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Liturgy, national custom, and the distinction of doctrine from folk practice.)
The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (feast articles).