Orthodox Easter (Pascha)

When it falls

The first Sunday after the first full moon after 21 March on the Julian calendar, which usually falls one to five weeks after Western Easter and occasionally on the same day, as in 2025.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

The same Resurrection, dated by the older computus, which also keeps the rule that Easter must follow the Jewish Passover. The Orthodox year has Pascha as the feast of feasts, and the week before it, Holy Week, holds a service on each day, from the bridegroom services of the first three nights to the burial procession of Friday and the Vigil of Saturday night.

At the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday the Patriarch enters the tomb alone and comes out with the Holy Fire, held to be lit without human hand, and it is passed from candle to candle through the crowd and flown the same night to Athens, Moscow, Belgrade and Bucharest.

How the day is kept

• Great Lent, forty-eight days of fasting from meat, fish, dairy, wine and oil, the strictest of the year.
• The midnight service: the church is dark, the priest brings out one candle at midnight with Come receive the light, the flame spreads through the crowd, and the procession goes out and round the church and returns to Christ is risen! (Christos Anesti, Khristos Voskrese), answered Truly he is risen.
• Red eggs cracked one against the other, the winner's uncracked; baskets of kulich and eggs blessed by the priest on the Saturday.
• In Greece the Friday night has the Epitaphios, the flowered bier carried through the streets; on Corfu clay pots are thrown from the balconies on Saturday morning.

At the table

Kulich, the tall sweet Easter bread with a white icing, and paskha, the pyramid of sweetened curd cheese stamped with XB (Christ is risen), in Russia; magiritsa soup at midnight and roast lamb on the day in Greece.

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