The Great Fast, and How the East Keeps It

Great Lent is the principal fasting season of the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic year, forty days of preparation for Pascha, distinct in both reckoning and rule from the Western Lent. It is counted from Clean Monday to the Friday before Lazarus Saturday, with Holy Week following as a separate and even stricter fast; the Sundays are not excluded from the count as they are in the West, and the season is framed by the liturgical book called the Triodion.

The traditional fast is not merely reduced eating but a change of diet, abstaining from meat, dairy, eggs, fish, wine and oil, with wine and oil allowed on certain days; the discipline is understood as ascetic training in the service of prayer and almsgiving rather than as an end in itself. The weekday liturgy changes character: the full eucharist is not celebrated on Lenten weekdays, replaced by the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, and the penitential Prayer of Saint Ephrem, with its prostrations, punctuates the services. Several Sundays carry set themes, from the veneration of the Cross at mid-Lent to the commemoration of ascetic teachers, giving the fast a clear inward shape.