Easter in West and East Today; Major Holiday in Greece

Despite the ostensibly complex ecclesiastical and cultural traditions, the major eastern and western Christian churches may again broach a compromise to hold the Easter feast day on the same day every year.

Orthodox and Catholic Easter are jointly observed and celebrated today. This isn’t always the case: Easter is a moveable feast, and the two churches use different astronomical calculations to set its date. The next time the western and eastern Churches celebrate the reverential religious festival together will be on April 16, 2028, followed again in 2031 – on April 13.

Orthodox Easter, regardless of whether an individual Patriarchate or Autocephalous Church follows the Julian (the Russian Church, for instance) or Gregorian calendar (Church of Greece), is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon (April 13) of the spring equinox. This year the spring equinox fell on March 20.

The Roman Catholic Church, along with practically all Protestant denominations, pinpoint the annual Easter – or Paschal – Feast using a different lunar calculation based on the reformed Gregorian calendar. The root of the difference dates back more than a millennium and a half, and to the early Christendom’s desire to avoid Easter coinciding with Jewish Passover.

Yet, despite the ostensibly complex ecclesiastical and cultural traditions, the major eastern and western Christian churches could one day reach a compromise and hold the great Easter feast day on the same day every year. This would also mean Easter Week, Palm Sunday and the devout Great Lent all acquiring the same universal dates every year, albeit still moveable. In fact, the Primates of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, i.e. the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (the primus inter pares of the world’s Orthodox patriarchs), and the Pope in Rome, the Pontifex maximus, has been considering doing just that, on and off, for decades.

The prospect is starting to look less hypothetical, however. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis are actually scheduled to meet next month in northwest Turkey to mark the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, a momentous ecumenical assembly of early Christian bishops convened in A.D. 325 in the ancient city of that name (modern-day Iznik), in what was then the Roman province of Bithynia, to achieve dogmatic consensus between east and west.

Furthermore, according to reports, the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Sacred and Holy Synod has once again issued a historic invitation to the Vatican to establish a common celebration of Easter.

A major holiday and religious celebration

In predominately Christian Orthodox Greece, Easter Sunday – today, April 20 – is the most important religious holiday for the nation of roughly 11 million and the culmination of Easter Holy Week. Urban-dwellers traditionally head for the provinces and islands, with many returning to their ancestral towns and villages.

The annual commemoration of Easter – called the Great and Holy Pascha in the Greek Orthodox tradition, with pascha being the Greek translation of “Passover” in Aramaic – is one of the two major travel and holiday periods in the country. The other is the August vacation period, which culminates in another religious feast day: the Dormition of the Virgin on Aug. 15.

The entire period of Lent extends over 48 days, with the most prominent Easter Sunday tradition being the roasting of a lamb or goat, the main dish on families’ dinner tables, which also feature eggs dyed red and other delicacies, rites and customs, depending on the region or island. The most festive liturgy of the entire Easter week comes on Great and Holy Saturday, marking what the Orthodox Church calls “the commemoration of the burial of Christ and His descent into Hades. It is the day between the Crucifixion of our Lord and His glorious Resurrection.”

Urban exodus

As with practically every Easter season in recent memory – with the notable exception of the recent pandemic – the exodus from Greece’s cities has been truly ‘biblical’ in scale.

According to Aegean Airlines, Greece’s flag carrier, the top foreign destinations for Greek holiday-makers over the holiday are major European cities, such as Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon and Amsterdam. Other up-and-coming destinations for this month’s holiday period are Malta, Dubrovnik and Izmir. In terms of domestic destinations for air travelers, “mainstays” such as Chania and Irakleio on Crete, Rhodes and the Cyclades are top on the list, while iconic Santorini – at least based on air-travel data for the days before Easter – appears to be recovering after intense, albeit non-destructive, seismic activity throughout much of February.

Near-capacity bookings had also been reported by inter-city bus companies in the greater Athens-Piraeus agglomeration and metropolitan Thessaloniki over the past week, with more routes added. Long lines of vehicles at toll booths exiting the Greek capital were again ubiquitous images on television news programs.

Passenger traffic at Piraeus, the country’s main port, was also reported as very high, with several ferry routes to Aegean Island destinations fully booked, according to the authorities.