Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Tomorrow, West Celebrates Easter, Egypt on April 28th


Sat 20 Apr 2019 | 12:46 PM
Yassmine Elsayed

The western world is set to celebrate the Easter, whose date is not fixed, but instead can be anytime between March 22 and April 25. This year it is on Sunday, April 21, where the Easter Monday bank holiday is on April 22.

The date is decided by a complex set of calculations based on observations of the moon.

According to a recent report by the British ‘Sun’, in early Christianity, different churches used different methods, leading to disagreements which remain unresolved centuries later.

Eastern and Western churches continue to celebrate Easter according to different calendars, although sometimes by chance the festivals coincide.

In Western Christianity, Easter Sunday must always follow the first full moon after the spring equinox. This, typically, happened around the Jewish festival Passover which begins on the night of the first full moon after the spring equinox, except in "leap months" when it is the second full moon, as in 2016.

Because the precise timing of observing the full moon can vary in each time zone, the Church instead calculates the date from ecclesiastical calendar.

This pides 19 normal calendar years into 235 months of 30 and 29 days each, with the ecclesiastical full moon on the 14th day of each lunar month.

The "paschal full moon" - from the Aramaic for Passover - is the one that falls on or after the spring equinox on March 21.

Easter Day is the first Sunday after the paschal full moon - so if the full moon is on a Sunday, Easter will be a week later.

Therefore the earliest Easter can be is March 22, and the latest is April 25.

It will not fall in March again until 2024 when it is on March 31.

Christians in the East use the Julian calendar, 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the West, so the full moon and equinox are calculated according to a different date.

This means in 2019 the Eastern church will celebrate Easter on April 28, a week after Western churches.

Some years, such as in 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2017, the two churches celebrated Easter on the same day. This will happen next in 2025.

In other years the festivals may be up to five weeks apart, as happened in 2013 and 2016.