Stariy Noviy God
One of the things I have met here in Kyrgyzstan that has always fascinated me is the fascination with celebrating almost any and every occasion possible. January 13th represents, perhaps, a classic example. It is a “holiday” known as Stariy Noviy God, (or “Old New Year”).
It could the apparent contradiction in the name that appeals to me, but it is logical. It was New Year’s Day under the old Julian Calendar which Russia clung to until after the Soviet in 1917.
The Julian Calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar on January 1st, 45 BC. As Suetonius put it, “Caesar … reorganized the calendar which the College of Priests had allowed to fall into such disorder, by inserting days or months as it suited them, that the harvest and vintage festivals no longer corresponded with the appropriate seasons.”
The basic problem was that the Romans, like many other ancient cultures, had developed a calendar based on lunar cycles with additional days, and even months, inserted by the priests in order to keep the calendar in line with the seasons. Over the centuries, however, the College of Priests had let the calendar fall out of sequence, either by pure neglect, or for manipulating the calendar for “political” reasons such as extending the term of office of a favoured consul, (or alternatively shortening one of a who was less official), or maximizing tax revenues. By the time that Caesar returned from his extended campaigns in Egypt in 46AD, the official calendar was some two months out of step with the solar year.
Caesar decreed that something must be done. He ordered a wholesale reform of the calendar, including inserting the two additional months that had been “lost” to bring the calendar back into line with the seasons, which resulted in the year of 46AD lasting a total of 445 days. He referred to this as being “the last year of confusion”, but which most people called simply “the year of confusion”.
As part of his reforms, he also moved the beginning of the year to January instead of March as was customary at the time.
Following what he had learned in Egypt, where they had a calendar based on the solar cycle rather than a lunar one, he decreed that the year should comprise of twelve months, with an alternating length of 30 and 31 days – with the exception of February, making a year of 365 days. Because that didn’t exactly coincide with the solar year, he added an additional day every fourth year, (leap year), to compensate for this and keep the calendar in order.
Although there were protests at his tinkering with the calendar, (Cicero, for example, complaining that Caesar was not content with ruling the earth, he also wanted to rule the stars), but Julius brought about a reform that not only removed the calendar from unscrupulous manipulation but also stood the test of time, well for fifteen centuries at least, and in the case of Russia for almost two thousand years.
It is true that the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, introduced some amendments to the Julian Calendar, but essentially the system worked, was logical and were soon accepted as the basis for reckoning the passage of time.
Good as his reforms were, however, they were not perfect. The solar year is not as precise as Caesar’s year of 365 and a quarter days, but a little bit shorter, (and in fact it is constantly changing, losing by about half a second every century). Towards the end of the thirteenth century, it was already obvious that something was amiss as seasonal drift had started once again and the solstices and equinoxes fell on strange dates which led Roger Bacon to exclaim that the calendar in use at that time was “intolerable in terms of logic, horrible as astronomy and undesirable as mathematics.”
There were several attempts to reform the system, but it wasn’t until 1582 that Pope Gregory finally managed to push through a reform which was logical and practical. Basically he removed the additional day, (February 29th), from three leap years in every four centuries. Like Julius Caesar before him, he also ordered an adjustment to return the calendar so that the solstices and equinoxes fell on their traditional dates.
In most of Catholic Europe, this led to the loss of 10 days from the calendar, which led not just to a “year of confusion” as it had for the Roman Dictator, but to riots as people felt that days of their lives had been stolen from them. Protestant countries adopted the new calendar at different times over the next couple of centuries, with Britain adopting it in 1752, losing eleven days in September of that year.
Russia, of course, belonged to the Orthodox world and clung resolutely to the Julian Calendar. Then, in 1917, came the Bolshevik Revolution and the new authorities decided to bring country into line with the rest of the world and into the twentieth century by adopting the Gregorian Calendar. In doing so, they had to adjust their calenday not by ten days, or eleven as England had had to do, but by thirteen.
An so it came about that the old New Year’s Day, (January 1st), according to the old, (Julian), Calendar fell on January 13th according to the new, (Gregorian), one. The Orthodox Church, however, retained its adherence to the Julian Calendar, (hence Christmas falling on January 7th, 13 days after the Western world celebrates the festival) and the populace as a whole seized to opportunity to celebrate both New Years.
Maybe it was pressure from the Soviet authorities, or maybe just the passage of time, but Stariy Noviy God is not a holiday as such today. Night Clubs and restaurants in Bishkek, always on the lookout for an opportunity to boost business, sometimes organize special events on the day, and one of my acquaintances has a birthday on January 13th and so always has a reason to commemorate the Old New Year, but generally it is not usually a “big” occasion. It is nowhere near as festive, for example, as the “New New Year” which has replaced it. For most people it is simply a nostalgic occasion which offers an excuse for family gatherings to mark the end of the New Year holiday cycle with its traditional large meals, singing and celebratory drinking, in much the same was as Twelfth Night in the West used to mark the end of the Christmas festivities.
Tonight, for example, I will taking down the New Year lights and other decorations and storing them away in a cupboard until, that is, next year.
Bishkek