About

Orthocal.info is an Eastern Orthodox calendar service providing commemorations, fasting, scripture readings and other information for each day of the liturgical year.

Two liturgical traditions are supported. Slavic reflects the practice of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). Greek reflects the practice of the Antiochian Archdiocese and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (GOA); this option is still in beta while its data continues to be verified. Either tradition can be viewed on the (New) Gregorian or (Old) Julian calendar.

Fasting indications for the Slavic tradition follow the OCA's Fasting & Fast-Free Seasons of the Church. The Greek tradition observes the same fasting seasons but with a few differences, the most notable being a more lenient first phase of the Nativity Fast and a handful of additional wine-and-oil allowances during Great Lent.

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 for the Slavic tradition 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. Calendar data for the Greek tradition was compiled from the Antiochian Archdiocese's website (antiochian.org) and cross-checked against the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (goarch.org).

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. The default translation is 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.

For readers who want modern English, as well as an Old Testament translated directly from the Septuagint, LXX2012 + WEB is available. The Eastern Orthodox Bible (EOB) project began as a revision of the WEB. Both LXX2012 and WEB come from Michael Paul Johnson's public-domain modernization work, published through eBible.org. LXX2012 updates Sir Lancelot Brenton's 1851 translation of the Septuagint, so it follows the same versification and Old Testament content—including the books outside the Protestant canon—that the lectionary itself is based on. The WEB (World English Bible) is an update of the 1901 American Standard Version, using the Byzantine Majority Text for the New Testament. It is a well-respected, easy-to-read translation without the interpretive biases of translations like the NIV. Both are public domain.

Some of the composite readings are taken from the translations of the Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash). His translations can be accessed at Anastasis.