197 days until Orthodox Easter 2027

Each weekday until Orthodox Easter 2027

Counting the days after today, up to and including Sunday, May 2, 2027. Useful for counting school days, work shifts or a weekly class before Orthodox Easter.

About Orthodox Easter

Orthodox Easter, called Pascha, is the celebration of Christ's resurrection in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the most important feast of its year. It follows Great Lent, a fast of roughly seven weeks, and Holy Week. The main service begins late on Saturday night in a darkened church. At midnight the priest brings out a single lit candle, the flame spreads from candle to candle through the congregation, and the faithful process around the church before proclaiming "Christ is risen!" with the reply "Truly he is risen!"

After the service, families break the Lenten fast, often in the early hours of Sunday morning. Eggs dyed deep red, a color tied to the blood of Christ and to new life, are a common sight, and many families play a game of tapping eggs together to see whose shell survives. Tables feature roast lamb and rich sweet breads such as Russian kulich, Greek tsoureki and Romanian cozonac. In Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia, the Easter weekend is a public holiday.

Orthodox and Western Christians use the same basic rule, the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, but calculate it differently. Western churches use the Gregorian calendar, adopted in 1582, while Orthodox churches keep the older Julian calendar, now 13 days behind, and its traditional full-moon tables. The result is that Orthodox Easter falls between April 4 and May 8 on today's calendar, either on the same Sunday as Western Easter or one, four or five weeks later. The two dates matched in 2025 and will match again in 2028.

How we check dates and facts: see our sources.

Orthodox Easter by year