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The 1923 Congress and the Milankovic Leap Rule

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The 1923 Congress and the Milankovic Leap Rule

In May 1923 a pan-Orthodox congress meeting in Constantinople took up a proposal to bring the fixed feasts back into alignment with the seasons without simply adopting the Gregorian calendar wholesale. The congress's astronomical delegate, the Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovic, proposed a new leap year rule: a year divisible by four is a leap year, except that a year divisible by one hundred is not, unless dividing it by nine hundred leaves a remainder of two hundred or six hundred, in which case it is a leap year after all. That rule tracks the true solar year even more closely than the Gregorian reform of 1582, and the two calendars will not diverge by even a single day until the year 2800. On the ground the change was simple: 1 October under the old Julian reckoning became 14 October, dropping thirteen days at a stroke. What the congress adopted was narrower than a full modernisation. It moved only the fixed feasts onto the new reckoning; the moveable cycle governing the date of Pascha stayed on the unrevised Julian computation, so churches that took up the reform kept a different Christmas from their Old Calendarist neighbours while continuing to celebrate Easter on exactly the same day as they always had.

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Source Milutin Milankovic and the Reform of the Julian Calendar in 1923 (Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage)M. S. Dimitrijevic, E. Th. Theodossiou and P. Z. Mantarakis
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Milutin Milankovic and the Reform of the Julian Calendar in 1923 (Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage)
M. S. Dimitrijevic, E. Th. Theodossiou and P. Z. Mantarakis, Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, Volume 11, Issue 1, pages 50 to 54, 2008Milankovic's leap rule and the 1923 Constantinople congressView the Source
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