About

Orthocal.info is an Eastern Orthodox calendar service providing commemorations, fasting, scripture readings and other information for each day of the liturgical year. The readings follow the Slavic calendar. Fasting indications follow the Fasting & Fast-Free Seasons of the Church provided by the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). The primary purpose of this service is to provide convenient access to daily devotional material for lay persons and not to be an authoritative or comprehensive guide to the feasts and fasts of the Church. The service supports this goal by providing tools for mobile developers and parish webmasters, an Alexa skill, multiple types of feeds, and a web interface.

Contact the Author

Orthocal.info is provided to the Orthodox community with no strings attached. However, it is helpful to me, the author of the work, to know who is using it and how. I will then be able to know how best to support your usage of the api and will be able to keep you informed about changes or maintenance work that needs to be done. Please contact me via the contact form on my blog, Parochianus, and let me know about your usage. Please report bugs using the Github issue tracker. And, as always, a link and an acknowledgement is nice, but not required.

Technology & Data

The Source Code is freely available. The original version of this site was written in a combination of Go and Node.js, but has been rewritten in Python and Django since the author finds that much easier to maintain. The site is deployed on Google Cloud Run and Firebase. The algorithm and calendar data used in this service are based on the algorithm and data developed by Paul Kachur for his orthodox_calendar project. The lives of the saints are taken by permission from John Brady's Abbamoses.com.

Scriptures

Because this is open-source and free, the service must use a translation of the Bible that is either public domain or has agreeable license terms. At this point I have chosen to stick with the King James Version. While not ideal, many clergy consider this to be one of the best options for Orthodox. Because the rubrics use Septuagint versification, a handful of the Old Testament readings may be incorrect. Some of the composite readings are taken from the translations of the Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash). His translations can be accessed at Anastasis.