No, not a picnic basket, nor Hemingway’s book about Paris.
‘Movable Feast’ is the Christian church’s term for a festival whose actual date
varies. Easter is such a feast, and not just because it has to fall on a
Sunday, and Good Friday has to be (duh) a Friday; that would limit the
variation to a week, but it’s much wider. I can’t claim to be in on the arcana
of the calculations; the protestants and Roman Catholics have one way of
working it out in common, and the Greek Orthodox another one entirely. As for
the Old Calendarist Orthodox, no doubt they have their own way too.
Orthodox and Protestant/Catholic Easter coincide once every
four years; this year Orthodox Easter is a week after Protestant/Catholic, but
sometimes the difference is as much as a month. Whenever I ask anyone how
Orthodox Easter is calculated, he or she says ‘Well it’s got something to do
with the moon’, but they don’t say what.
This year, however, I find a clue in my Greek diary: Orthodox Easter coincides
with the start of the last quarter of the moon. Now when the last quarter of
the moon starts, it rises at midnight. (Proper, sidereal midnight, i.e.
half-way between sunset and sunrise, whatever the clock says.) And in the
Orthodox tradition, the resurrection of Christ is celebrated, with much ringing
of bells, fireworks, and in some parts of Greece gunshots and even sticks of
dynamite tossed playfully about, on the dot of midnight between Saturday and
Sunday.
Here — yes, I know I’ve put it in the blog before — is Piero
della Francesca’s painting of the terrifying original event:
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