Ukraine's 2023 Departure and What It Marks

Which Orthodox churches keep the unrevised calendar is not a fixed historical fact but a live and still moving line. In July 2023 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine's own local council voted to adopt the Revised Julian calendar for its fixed feasts, effective that September, a change reported at the time as part of a wider institutional distancing from Moscow rather than a purely calendrical decision, and corroborated by multiple independent outlets covering the vote. The Russian Orthodox Church, along with the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Georgia, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the monastic communities of Mount Athos, took the opposite side of that same choice and remained on the unrevised calendar, so a decision first made in 1923 by a pan-Orthodox congress in Constantinople is still, a full century later, read as a marker of which jurisdiction a given church aligns itself with. Old Believers, who left the Russian church over a seventeenth century liturgical dispute unrelated to the calendar question, were never in any position to adopt either twentieth century reform in the first place and have kept the unrevised reckoning throughout, for reasons that predate the 1923 controversy by more than two hundred years and rest on an entirely separate historical grievance.