Old New Year
Nowhere else in the world is there, probably, sucha holiday like ours, on the Slavic lands. Old New Year! The New Year has become "old" because of the change in the calendar, according to which the chronology took place, from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, many historical dates are known to us with the "old style" amendment. An amazing phenomenon is the celebration of the OldNew Year - appeared for the October Revolution, when the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR of January 24, 1918, introduced an amendment to the calendar for 13 days. Since then, disputes over the "correctness" of calendar chronology have been ongoing.
Let us turn to history. The Julian calendar, according to which a large part of the world population still lives, was introduced by Julius Caesar from January 1, 45 BC. However, due to the fact that in this calendar each year is 365.5 days, it is considered to be every fourth year a leap year, i.e. containing 366 days, and the remaining years to take 365 days. Due to the rounding, the resulting calendar year lagged behind the tropical year by 11 minutes 12 seconds. For every 128 years, the lag reached 1 day.
By the XVI century, the difference between calendar andthe astronomical year already reached 10 days. And then in 1582, following the reform of Pope Gregory XIII, a new calendar was adopted, in which the resulting delay was eliminated. Why was it important to remove this difference in 10 days? The fact is that almost all church holidays are "tied" to the lunar calendar, the days of equinox and the solstice. Because of the difference between the calendar year and the astronomical, now the days of the equinox and the new moon were on completely different dates and this created difficulties. Therefore, it was decided to subtract those leap years from the number of leap years (that is, end in 00), the number of hundreds in which is not a multiple of 4. With this way of reckoning, the difference per day is accumulated over 3280 years, which ensures the accuracy of the new calendar for a long time. Such a calendar was called Gregorian.
The Orthodox Church "lives" in the Juliancalendar. And according to this calendar on January 1, when it is customary to officially celebrate the New Year in most countries, falls on the time of the Nativity Fast. Therefore, Orthodox believers celebrate the New Year on the night of 13 to 14 January, which according to the Gregorian calendar corresponds to the night from December 31 to January 1, according to the Julian calendar. By the way, many historians believe that just in order to turn people away from religion, the Bolshevik government adopted the Gregorian calendar.
But one way or another, the New Year in the old stylecelebrate in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In addition, the Old New Year is celebrated by Russian-speaking Orthodox residents in other parts of the world.
