Ethiopia counts time in its own calendar, and its great feasts belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church — arks carried to the water at Timkat, the demera bonfire at Meskel, and a September New Year of yellow flowers.
Photo: Jean Rebiffé from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ethiopia’s official civil calendar has twelve months of thirty days and a thirteenth month of five or six days, and its year begins in September; the dates in this atlas are calculated from it. Its best-known festivals are feasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, celebrated with processions, chanting priests and huge public gatherings.
Two of them are inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: Meskel, the commemoration of the finding of the True Cross, in 2013, and Timkat, the Ethiopian Epiphany, in 2019.
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At the end of the rainy season, Ethiopians commemorate the finding of the True Cross by lighting the demera — a great pyre decorated with yellow daisies — in Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square, where priests chant and dance before the patriarch sets it alight.
September 26 – 27, 2026Calculated
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Ethiopia’s Orthodox Epiphany celebrates the baptism of Christ — on the eve, priests carry each church’s tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, to a river or pool; at dawn the water is blessed and sprinkled over hundreds of thousands, before the arks return home in dancing processions.
January 18 – 19, 2027Calculated
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The Ethiopian New Year arrives in September, as the rains end and hillsides turn yellow with adey abeba flowers — a day of church, family meals of injera and wat, and girls in new clothes going door to door with bouquets and the song “Abebaye hoy”.
September 12, 2027Calculated