The Synod Votes for the New Calendar, and Parishioners Do Not Follow

In March 1924 the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece adopted the Revised Julian calendar the previous year's Constantinople congress had proposed, applying it to the fixed feasts of the church year while keeping the unrevised Julian calendar for Easter and the movable feasts that depend on it. The change was announced with little warning to ordinary parishes, and it meant that the Christmas the faithful had always kept became a date thirteen days earlier than the one their calendars had shown the year before.

Opposition arose immediately among the lower clergy and among laypeople who had not been consulted, and it did not fade. The objection was not only to the new date but to the authority behind it: critics argued that a change to the church's own calendar touched the whole Orthodox world and so could only be decided by an ecumenical council with every local church represented, not by one national synod acting alone. Congregations that refused the new calendar kept their own priests, then their own bishops, and the movement organised into what is known today as the Greek Old Calendarists, or Genuine Orthodox Christians, a body with its own hierarchy that remains outside communion with the Church of Greece a full century later.

The split is a domestic one, running inside a single national church rather than across the Greek speaking world this atlas describes elsewhere as a rite carried well beyond any one nation.