Ethiopian Calendar

The Ethiopian calendar shares its structure with the Coptic calendar it descends from, twelve months of thirty days plus Pagume, a thirteenth month of five days, six in a leap year, but it counts its Incarnation era from a different calculation of the Annunciation than the one Byzantine and Western Christianity eventually settled on, so the Ethiopian year runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian count depending on the point in the Gregorian year: seven years behind from the Ethiopian new year in September through the Gregorian new year in January, and eight years behind for the stretch from January to the Ethiopian new year, because the Ethiopian year begins roughly nine months earlier in the Gregorian calendar than the Gregorian year itself does.

The new year, Enkutatash, falls on the equivalent of the eleventh of September, the twelfth in the year before a Gregorian leap year, essentially coinciding with the Coptic Nayrouz, since both trace to the same Alexandrian reform of the old Egyptian civil year. Ethiopia is the one country that never adopted the Gregorian calendar for civil life, so the calendar's role is not confined to the church: government documents, birth certificates and daily newspapers in Ethiopia are dated by this reckoning, running the seven or eight year gap into everyday civil administration rather than leaving it a purely liturgical distinction.

The calendar is shared by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and it governs both communities' full liturgical cycle: the long Ethiopian fasts including the fifty five day Great Lent, the feast of Timkat forty days after Ethiopian Christmas commemorating Christ's baptism, and Meskel in late September marking the finding of the True Cross, one of the most widely celebrated public holidays in the Ethiopian calendar. Because the calendar is also the civil calendar, these dates are not confined to church attendance the way a purely liturgical calendar's would be.

Ethiopian television, banking and government business run on this dating, so the seven or eight year offset from the Gregorian count is a fact of daily administrative life for the country rather than a specialist's footnote, and Ethiopians commonly celebrate the calendar's own turn of a new decade or century years later, by Gregorian reckoning, than the rest of the world does. The dual church and state role also means the calendar has proven durable in a way few other purely religious reckonings have. Where the Coptic calendar it descends from now serves the church alone in Egypt, Ethiopia's version still structures the whole society's sense of what day, month and year it is.