The Church lives the year differently from the world. Her year begins on 1 September and unfolds through fasts and feasts, while every day brings the commemoration of one saint—or several. Anyone who wants to keep pace with this year needs a calendar. For a long time, that calendar hung on the wall or travelled in a pocket, printed on paper. Now it can live on your phone as well.
We made an app for that. It is called Orthodox Calendar, it is free, and it is available for iPhone and Android.
The Day at a Glance
Open the app and you can see the day at once: the saints commemorated, the feast if there is one, and the fasting rule—whether it is a fast day, fish, wine and oil are permitted, or there is no fast. The fasting rules follow the calendar for the faithful published by the Romanian Patriarchate, rather than the stricter monastic typikon: in other words, the same guidance you would find in a printed church calendar.
Sundays are shown by name—the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, for example—together with the appointed Epistle and Gospel readings and the tone of the week: one of the Church’s eight tones, the cycle of liturgical melodies that changes from one Sunday to the next.
New Calendar and Old Calendar
The app knows both calendars. With a single tap, you can switch between the New Calendar, followed by the Romanian Orthodox Church and most other Orthodox Churches, and the Old Calendar, followed by the Russian Orthodox Church, Mount Athos, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Serbian Orthodox Church. Pascha and the entire movable cycle remain the same—they are calculated according to the same Paschalion, the rule used to determine the date of Pascha—while fixed feasts move by thirteen days, as expected.
It was made for those who live between these two worlds: people with relatives or friends in a Church that follows the other calendar, those who visit an Old Calendar monastery, or anyone who simply wants to understand why Russian Christmas falls on 7 January.
The Whole of Scripture
The app contains the entire Bible. In Romanian, this is the 1914 Holy Synod edition—the Old and New Testaments, including the books known as the anagignoskomena (“worthy to be read”), which the Church preserves in the Old Testament although they are absent from the Hebrew canon—all in the old yet lucid language in which generations have read the word of God. For English readers, the King James Version is included.
The Gospel and Epistle readings of the day are more than references—the full text is there, ready to read. On the great feasts, the paremias—the Old Testament readings appointed at Vespers—are included as well.
The Psalter, in Its Liturgical Order
The Psalter is the Church’s book of prayer, and in the app it is kept separate from the Bible, just as it is on the shelf. The 150 psalms are divided into the twenty kathismata—the sections into which the Church arranged the Psalter for reading in the services. Each kathisma has its three stases, with “Glory…” in its proper place, as well as the opening prayers and the prayer that follows each kathisma. A kathisma is read as a whole, in its appointed order—not one psalm at a time.
In the Romanian text, unlike the Bible, the psalms use the updated language of today’s prayer books—the same language in which you hear them in church and pray them at home—because the Psalter is not read merely as a text for study, but spoken as prayer.
What Else You Will Find in the App
Name days: type a name and discover the day on which the saint who bears it is commemorated. Notifications, if you want them: one in the morning with the saints of the day, and one in the evening with the saints of tomorrow. The daily card: open a saint’s day, tap the share icon in the upper-right corner, and the app creates an image of the day—the date, the saints commemorated, the appointed service and the fasting rule—which you can send to a friend on WhatsApp or through any other app on your phone. It is accompanied by a line with the saint’s name and the address where your friend can download the app if they would like it too. There are also three colour themes: a light theme, a gentler one for evening reading, and a dark theme.
What It Does Not Have
Advertisements. A subscription. An account to create. The calendar, Bible and Psalter are stored on your phone, so they work without an internet connection—in a train, on a plane, or at a monastery with no signal.
Where to Get It
If you use the app and find it helpful, leaving a rating in the app store helps it reach others. And if something is not as it should be—a date is wrong or a saint is missing—write to us at contact@ortodoxway.com. The calendar is checked with care, but it is made by human hands.