About Orthodox Atlas

What this is

Orthodox Atlas is a reference to the worship of the Orthodox Church: the Divine Liturgy and the daily services, the prayers, the lives of the saints, the feasts of the Church year, the hymns and the daily readings, and a directory of Orthodox parishes around the world.

It is free to use, carries no advertising, and asks for no account. The site is the reference — everything there is, searchable and shareable. The app is the personal companion: today’s saints and readings, the fast, and the texts you keep with you.

The calendar

The Church keeps time in more than one way. Most Orthodox Churches follow either the Old Calendar (the Julian calendar throughout) or the New Calendar (Pascha and the moveable feasts by the Julian reckoning, the fixed feasts on the Revised Julian calendar); the Church of Finland alone reckons Pascha by the Gregorian calendar. Orthodox Atlas computes all three.

Which one you see follows the Church you choose in the settings: a parish inherits the reckoning of its diocese, and the diocese that of its Church, so the calendar stays in step with the Church’s own governance rather than with a setting you would have to know to change. You can also pin a reckoning directly.

The date of Pascha is computed exactly, in the Julian calendar, and cross-checked against published tables and an independent calendar service. The engine carries a version: when a correction ships, every day computed under the old version is recomputed.

Fasting

Each day carries one of five fasting levels: fast-free, cheese and wine, fish, wine and oil, or strict. The great fasting seasons and the named strict days are the same for the whole Church. Where practice differs — on the ordinary Wednesday and Friday, and in the relaxations during the Apostles’ and Dormition fasts — the level follows the praxis of the Church you choose, or one you set yourself.

This is a reference, not a rule of life. The fast is kept within a parish and under the guidance of one’s priest or spiritual father, and where they differ from what is shown here, they govern.

The texts and where they come from

Every English text traces to a public-domain or cleared source — above all Isabel Hapgood’s Service Book of 1906, with Wikisource and the Ponomar project alongside. Where a text exists only in a copyrighted modern translation, it is left out rather than reproduced without leave or attributed to the wrong hand.

Serbian service texts are reproduced with the permission of svetosavlje.org. Traditional texts in other languages are reproduced with attribution to the sites that keep them, and Scripture comes from public-domain editions on eBible: the King James Version with the Deuterocanon, the Synodal Bible, the Daničić–Karadžić translation, Brenton’s Septuagint, the Byzantine New Testament and others. Every page names its own source at its foot.

Saints and artwork

The lives of the saints draw on crkvenikalendar.com, on Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki (both under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licences), and on Wikidata (public domain). Icons and other artwork come from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain or released under CC0, and each image carries its credit where it is shown.

The church directory

Parishes, cathedrals and monasteries come from OpenStreetMap, supplemented by the directories of the Orthodox Church in America, the Antiochian Archdiocese, the Romanian Episcopate and the Serbian Church in North America. Closed and ruined churches are dropped and nearby duplicates merged, but the map is only as good as its sources: OpenStreetMap records a church’s jurisdiction coarsely, positions may be approximate, and a parish may be missing. Every church page has a link for reporting a correction.

Languages

The site and the app speak ten languages: English, Serbian in both scripts, Greek, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Macedonian and Georgian. Texts exist in fourteen, including Church Slavonic, French, Arabic and Albanian, though coverage varies widely from one language to the next. Texts appear only in the language you choose; anything not yet translated is left out rather than shown in English.

The app

Orthodox Atlas for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch shows the day as it is — the saints, the readings, the fast and the tone — with widgets and watch complications, texts you can download for reading offline, and reading positions kept in your own iCloud. A link to any page on this site opens the same page in the app.

Privacy

There are no accounts, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party analytics. Our own server counts how many people use the site and the app, from which country and in which language, and nothing more. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is collected.

Who makes it

Orthodox Atlas is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published under the blessing of any Church or jurisdiction, and it claims no authority of its own: it gathers what the Church has published and shows it plainly, with its sources named.

Corrections

Every saint, feast, text, church and calendar day has a “Report a problem” link at its foot. Reports are anonymous — a reason, and a note if you wish — and go to a moderation inbox where the content is put right. If a translation reads badly or a date is wrong, that is the way to say so. The frequently asked questions answer the commonest ones.