Religion
Samhain
At the Hill of Tlachtga in County Meath, archaeologists have excavated a vast circular enclosure — over 150 metres across, built in overlapping phases …
Topic
Religion
Religious festivals, feast days and observances drawn from the world’s many faith traditions.
21 articles
Religion
Imbolc
In the ninth-century Irish tale Tochmarc Emire, the heroine Emer lists the year’s four great festivals as conditions Cú Chulainn must meet …
Religion
Bodhi Day
Under a pipal tree at Bodh Gaya in the Ganges plain, somewhere around the sixth or fifth century BCE, a thirty-five-year-old ascetic named Siddhartha …
Religion
World Interfaith Harmony Week
On 23 September 2010, King Abdullah II of Jordan stood before the 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and proposed a …
Religion
Vesak (Buddha Day)
In May 1950, at the first conference of the newly founded World Fellowship of Buddhists in Colombo, delegates from twenty-seven countries agreed to …
Religion
Valentines Day
In 1415, while held in the Tower of London after his capture at Agincourt, Charles, Duke of Orléans, wrote to his wife and called her his “très …
Religion
St. Nicholas Day
On the night of 5 December, children across the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria leave a shoe by the fireplace or front door, sometimes with …
Religion
Scottish Saint Andrews Day
According to a legend the Scots have cherished for more than a thousand years, on the eve of a battle near the East Lothian village of Athelstaneford, …
Religion
Saint Patricks Day
In 1962, a crew of Chicago plumbers tipped a hundred pounds of dye into the river that runs through the city’s downtown and turned it emerald …
Religion
Saint Davids Day
Sometime around the year 589, in a remote valley on the Pembrokeshire coast, a Welsh bishop is said to have given a last sermon to the monks gathered …
Religion
Hanukkah
In 164 BCE, a band of Jewish rebels led by Judah Maccabee retook the Temple in Jerusalem from the forces of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, and set …
Religion
EU Talent Day
The date belongs to a composer. On 25 March 1881, Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, then in Hungary and now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania, and …
Religion
Epiphany
By the year 361, when the pilgrim traveller Egeria described the churches of Jerusalem keeping a great festival in early January, Epiphany was already …
Religion
Easter Sunday
In the year 325, the bishops gathered by the emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea settled an argument that had divided Christians for …
Religion
Diwali
On the darkest night of the lunar month of Kartik, when the moon has thinned to nothing, hundreds of millions of homes across India and the Indian …
Religion
Day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary
On 1 November 1950, standing in St Peter’s Square before an immense crowd, Pope Pius XII spoke the words that fixed a fifteen-centuries-old …
Religion
Christmas Eve
Late on the night of 24 December 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force, dug into the waterlogged trenches of Flanders, heard something carrying …
Religion
Christmas Day
The earliest surviving record of Christmas being celebrated on 25 December is a Roman document from the year 354, the Chronograph of 354, which lists …
Religion
Candlemas Day
In Jerusalem around the year 380, a Spanish pilgrim named Egeria wrote home describing a feast she had seen kept forty days after Epiphany, with a …
Religion
All Souls Day
Sometime around the turn of the first millennium, an abbot named Odilo, head of the great monastery of Cluny in Burgundy, issued an instruction to …
Religion
All Saints Day
On 13 May in the year 609 or 610, Pope Boniface IV stood in the Pantheon in Rome — a domed temple built centuries earlier for the pagan gods of the …