Orthodox Christian Fasting

Four multi week fasts structure the Orthodox liturgical year. Great Lent, the longest and strictest, runs for forty days before Holy Week and Pascha and is preceded by preparatory weeks that gradually reduce what may be eaten. The Nativity Fast covers the forty days before Christmas, kept less strictly than Lent in most jurisdictions. The Apostles Fast runs from the Monday after All Saints Sunday to the feast of Peter and Paul, its length varying from year to year because it depends on the date of Pascha, and the two week Dormition Fast precedes the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos in mid August.

On top of these come the weekly fasts: most Orthodox Christians abstain on Wednesdays, in memory of the betrayal of Christ, and on Fridays, in memory of the crucifixion, throughout the year outside a handful of fast free periods that follow major feasts. Taken together, a fully observant calendar spends roughly half the year, counting both the long fasts and the weekly days, under some degree of restriction, though pastoral practice everywhere allows for individual circumstances such as illness, pregnancy, age and travel. Great Lent itself is preceded by several preparatory weeks, among them the weeks named for the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and Meatfare and Cheesefare Sunday, which step the diet down in stages rather than beginning the full fast without warning, meat first, then dairy, so that the body and the household are not asked to change everything at once. Even within Lent, fish is permitted on Palm Sunday and on the Annunciation, a reminder that the calendar is a deliberate structure rather than one blanket rule.

Orthodox fasting is a change in kind of food rather than a reduction in quantity: on a strict fasting day meat, dairy, eggs, fish, olive oil and wine are all set aside, and the diet becomes plant based, which is why the practice is sometimes loosely described from the outside as a form of periodic veganism, though the tradition itself frames it as ascetic discipline rather than dietary ethics. Strictness varies through the calendar: fish, oil and wine are permitted on many otherwise fasting days according to the feast being kept, and the strictest days, such as the first week of Lent and Holy Week, allow far less.

Monastics generally keep a fuller version of the calendar than most laypeople are expected to, and married couples, the sick, travelers and small children have long been granted latitude by their priests, a pastoral flexibility that the tradition treats as built into the discipline rather than as a departure from it. What unites the practice across this variation is the belief that fasting is inseparable from prayer and almsgiving, a bodily discipline meant to serve repentance rather than an end in itself. The tradition has a name for the strictest form of this discipline, xerophagy, dry eating, food prepared without oil and taken only once a day on the most demanding days of the year, a standard monasteries generally keep closer to in full than most lay households are asked to. Historically the calendar took its settled shape across the Byzantine centuries, compiled into the Typikon alongside the rest of the liturgical order, and it remains one of the clearest points of continuity between the medieval Byzantine church and Orthodox practice today, observed with only modest local variation across the Greek, Slavic, Arab and other jurisdictions that share it.