Frequently Asked Questions

Whichever your Church follows. Choose your Church in the settings and the calendar takes its reckoning: the Old Calendar (Julian) for the Churches of Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Georgia, Poland and others; the New Calendar (Pascha by the Julian reckoning, the fixed feasts on the Revised Julian calendar) for Constantinople, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Antioch and others; and the Gregorian Paschalion for Finland. You can also pin a reckoning directly, whatever your Church.

Most often because of the calendar itself: the Old and New Calendars are thirteen days apart, so the same fixed feast falls on different civil dates. Check the Church chosen in the settings first.

Beyond that, each local Church keeps commemorations of its own, and a parish may keep its patronal feast or a local saint that no general calendar lists. The saints shown for a day are ordered by prominence, so a lesser commemoration your parish keeps may sit further down the list, or be absent.

Each day is given one of five levels — fast-free, cheese and wine, fish, wine and oil, or strict — from the fasting seasons, the fixed fast days and the feasts that relax them. The seasons and the named strict days are the same for every Orthodox Church. Where practice differs, on ordinary Wednesdays and Fridays and during the Apostles’ and Dormition fasts, the level follows the praxis of your Church, or the one you set yourself: stricter, as a monastery keeps it, or as a parish commonly does.

What is shown is a reference. Your parish and your priest or spiritual father govern how you keep the fast, and where they differ from this page, follow them.

The daily readings are computed from the date of Pascha: the weeks after Pentecost, the weeks of Great Lent and the cycle of the eleven Matins Gospels. The lectionary data comes from the Orthocal project. When a feast falls on a weekday, the readings of the day are sometimes moved to a neighbouring day, and those transfers vary from one Church to another; Orthodox Atlas does not reproduce them, so the readings shown may differ from what is read in your parish.

The date of Pascha is computed exactly and checked against published tables, known feast dates and an independent calendar service, and the whole engine is exercised by tests across every year it supports. The engine carries a version: when a correction ships, every day computed under the old version is recomputed. Mistakes still happen, above all in which saints a day lists and how their names are rendered — if you find one, use the “Report an issue” link on the day’s page.

Because it has not been translated yet, or because no translation is free to reproduce. Texts appear only in the language you choose; anything not yet translated is left out rather than shown in English. Coverage varies widely — English, Serbian, Greek and Russian are the fullest — and grows as sources are cleared.

From public-domain and cleared sources. The English services and prayers come chiefly from Isabel Hapgood’s Service Book of 1906, with Wikisource and the Ponomar project alongside; Serbian texts are reproduced with the permission of svetosavlje.org; texts in other languages are reproduced with attribution to the sites that keep them. Scripture comes from public-domain editions on eBible. The lives of the saints draw on crkvenikalendar.com, Wikipedia, OrthodoxWiki and Wikidata. Every page names its own source at its foot; the About page says more.

Most likely because no free translation of it exists in that language. Many of the translations in common parish use are modern and in copyright, and Orthodox Atlas does not reproduce a text without leave. Where a text exists only in such a translation it is omitted rather than copied or attributed to the wrong hand. As public-domain and permitted sources are found, the gaps close.

For your own prayer and for use in your parish, yes. For anything wider, the terms are those of the source named at the foot of each page: public-domain texts may be reproduced freely, texts under a Creative Commons licence carry its conditions, and texts reproduced here by permission remain their publishers’ to license. Icons and photographs carry their own credit and licence where they are shown.

From OpenStreetMap, which supplies most of the roughly twenty-seven thousand churches across more than ninety countries, and from the parish 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 entries within a short distance of each other are merged.

Use the “Report a problem” link at the foot of the church’s page and say what is wrong — the name, the position, the jurisdiction — or, for a missing parish, report it from a nearby church’s page with the details. OpenStreetMap records a church’s jurisdiction coarsely (parishes of the Russian Church Abroad and of the Orthodox Church in America, for instance, are often recorded simply as Russian), so a misattributed jurisdiction is the commonest fault. A parish added to OpenStreetMap also appears here after the next import.

No. There are no accounts anywhere in Orthodox Atlas. The site remembers your language, Church and calendar choices in a cookie on your own device, and sets one anonymous cookie so that its own server can count how many people use it; nothing else is stored about you.

Through the settings, behind the gear in the header. The language changes both the interface and the texts; the Church sets the calendar and the fast, unless you pin those directly beneath it. The same choices are made in the app’s Settings.

Yes — Orthodox Atlas for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, with home-screen widgets and watch complications, texts for reading offline, and quiet daily notifications. There is no Android app; the site works in any browser, on any device, and can be added to a home screen.

In the app, yes: any service or prayer can be downloaded, and the downloaded copy is refreshed whenever you read it online. The site itself needs a connection.

Yes. Everything on the site comes from a public, documented API, free to use; the API reference describes every endpoint. Requests are rate-limited, and the texts carry the licences of their sources.

No. It is an independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published under the blessing of any Church or jurisdiction. It gathers what the Church has published and shows it with its sources named; it claims no authority of its own, and it is no substitute for a parish or a priest.

No. There is 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 stores no address and no profile. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is collected.

Every saint, feast, text, church and calendar day has a “Report a problem” link at its foot. Choose what is wrong, add a note if you wish, and send. Reports are anonymous and go to a moderation inbox where the content is corrected. You will not hear back — there is no address to reply to — but the correction will appear on the page.

Yes, entirely: the site, the app and the API, with no advertising and nothing to unlock.