Quand la coordination temporelle mondiale nuit à l’eurythmie locale 

Abstract

The Greek state replaced the Julian calendar by the Gregorian one in 1923 in order to accelerate the modernization process and facilitate the exchanges with the other industrialized countries. After a year, the Church of Greece followed the movement, implementing a reform that seemed to conduct to “a westernization of Orthodoxy” according to a part of Greek society. Those who decided to keep the Julian calendar are commonly referred to as “old calendarists”; their presence is particularly important on the island of Tinos, where Orthodox and Catholics cohabit since the thirteenth century. This division has marked Greek society, where time is unified in the civil domain but not for religious practices: except for the Easter period, all the other religious feasts take place twice and with a thirteen-day discrepancy. This article examines how, because of this duplication of temporalities, Greek society lost its eurhythmy.

Keywords

• temporality
• Greece
• calendar
• temporal coordination
• Orthodoxy
• religious feast