One Feast, Two Calendars, Two Weeks Apart

Because a number of Orthodox churches, including the Russian, Serbian, Georgian and Jerusalem patriarchates and Mount Athos, continue to use the Julian calendar for fixed feasts while others, including the churches of Constantinople, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, adopted a revised calendar aligned with the Gregorian civil calendar in the early twentieth century, Theophany falls on two different civil dates depending on which calendar a given Orthodox church follows: 6 January by the revised calendar, and 19 January by the civil reckoning for churches still keeping the older Julian dating, a thirteen-day gap that will continue to widen further in future centuries as the Julian and Gregorian calendars continue to drift apart.

This calendar split means that a visitor in a country with both Old and New Calendarist Orthodox communities, or observing Orthodox communities in different countries, may see Theophany blessings of water performed on two entirely different days within the same January, a visible and recurring reminder that Orthodox Christianity, despite sharing the same feast and the same theology of the day, has never achieved a single unified civil calendar across all its self-governing churches.