One Calendar, Church and State Together

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.