typikon

The Orthodox liturgical day: feasts, seasons and the fast, computed rather than fetched. Twenty Orthodox jurisdictions and four Byzantine Catholic churches, across the Julian, Revised Julian and Gregorian reckonings.

Everything derives from the paschalion and the fixed calendar, so it needs no network, cannot go stale, and answers for any year you ask about. No API key, no service that might be gone next year, no cache to invalidate.

$ typikon --jurisdiction rocor --date 2026-03-18

  Wednesday 18 March 2026   — 5 March in the church calendar
  Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia · the Typikon · slavic usage

  🥬  The Holy Martyr Conon

      xerophagy — no oil or wine
      a weekday of the Great Fast
      Great Fast

A week at a time, which is what you want the day before a fast begins:

$ typikon --jurisdiction antiochian --date 2027-04-26 --days 7

  Antiochian Orthodox Church · the Typikon

  🥬 Mon 26 Apr  xerophagy — no oil or wine      The Holy Hieromartyr Basil, Bishop…
  🥬 Tue 27 Apr  xerophagy — no oil or wine      The Holy Hieromartyr Symeon, kinsman…
  🥬 Wed 28 Apr  xerophagy — no oil or wine      The Holy Apostles Jason and Sosipater
  🫒 Thu 29 Apr  wine and oil permitted          Great and Holy Thursday
  ⛔ Fri 30 Apr  no food until evening           Great and Holy Friday
  🥬  Sat 1 May  xerophagy — no oil or wine      Great and Holy Saturday
  🍖  Sun 2 May  no fast                         The Radiant and Life-giving…

Install

One static binary, no runtime to install first.

$ cargo install --git https://git.pumpin.online/funkpower/typikon

Rust 1.85 or newer. The name typikon on crates.io belongs to an unrelated project, so cargo install typikon and a typikon = "1" dependency will not get you this; install and depend on it by git URL.

Or build it from a checkout:

$ git clone https://git.pumpin.online/funkpower/typikon
$ cd typikon && cargo build --release
$ install -Dm755 target/release/typikon ~/.local/bin/typikon

The menologion is compiled in, so the binary answers for every day of the year on its own: no data file to find, no network, nothing to go stale.

For Python, there is a wheel:

$ pip install typikon

The menologion is compiled into that too, so it carries no data files and needs no network either. Wheels are built for Linux on x86-64 and aarch64; everywhere else pip falls back to the source distribution, which needs a Rust toolchain of 1.85 or newer on the installing machine.

For JavaScript and TypeScript, there is a package:

$ npm install typikon

WebAssembly, so the one package serves Node, Deno, Bun and the browser with no native build to go wrong.

Which calendar?

Three things get conflated constantly, and keeping them apart is most of what this library is for:

Paschalion	which table gives Pascha, Julian or Gregorian
Menologion	which calendar the fixed feasts are read on
Rule	which fasting discipline is kept

Almost every Orthodox Church keeps the Julian Paschalion. What divides them is the menologion. The old-calendar churches read the fixed feasts on the Julian calendar too; the new-calendar churches read them on the Revised Julian, which agrees with the Gregorian for every date until 2800. So a new-calendar church keeps the Nativity with the West and Pascha with the East, not a compromise but exactly what the 1923 congress decided.

Greek or Slavic usage

Both keep the same Typikon and read it a little differently. Two of those differences are modelled, and each is visible in the output:

	Slavic	Greek
The Protection, 1 October	great feast	lower rank; Greece keeps it on 28 October besides
Fish in the Nativity Fast	Saturdays and Sundays	any day but Wednesday and Friday, until 17 December

Every jurisdiction carries the usage its books follow. --tradition slavic or --tradition greek overrides it, which is what you want for a parish that does not match its jurisdiction's default.

$ typikon -j goarch --date 2026-10-01 --format tsv --fields rank,sign,fast,title
rank	sign	fast	title
vigil	✚	none	The Protection of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos

$ typikon -j goarch --date 2026-10-01 --tradition slavic --format tsv --fields rank,sign,fast,title
rank	sign	fast	title
great	⊕	none	The Protection of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos

The rank is not decoration: it is what lifts a Wednesday or Friday fast, so the usage changes what you eat as well as what you sing.

Which calendar?

Pick a reckoning without naming a church:

$ typikon --calendar old        # Julian throughout
$ typikon --calendar new        # Revised Julian fixed feasts, Julian Pascha
$ typikon --calendar western    # Gregorian throughout

Or name one, which also picks up its fasting rule and any local saints:

$ typikon --jurisdiction rocor
$ typikon --jurisdiction antiochian --days 7
$ typikon --list                # every accepted value

The first run writes your choice to ~/.config/typikon/config.toml and stops asking. --set-default remembers the whole invocation, not just the jurisdiction:

$ typikon --set-default ruthenian --typikon

records the discipline and the usage alongside the church, so a terminal and a desktop widget on the same machine cannot end up disagreeing about the same day. Override any of it for one run with the flags, or set TYPIKON_JURISDICTION.

Twenty Orthodox jurisdictions ship: the old-calendar churches (Moscow, ROCOR, Serbia, Georgia, Jerusalem, the Holy Mountain, Poland, Macedonia, ACROD), the new-calendar ones (Constantinople, Greece, GOARCH, Antioch, the OCA, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Albania, Ukraine), and the Finnish Orthodox Church, alone among the Orthodox in keeping the Gregorian Paschalion. Four Byzantine Catholic churches ship alongside them.

The Byzantine Catholic churches

Four are modelled, and they are not a footnote on the Orthodox ones: they keep different paschalions, and their fasting is a different kind of thing.

	calendar	fasting
ruthenian	Gregorian throughout	Ruthenian particular law, sourced
ugcc	Revised Julian feasts, Julian Pascha since 2023	its own; not modelled
melkite	Gregorian; Middle Eastern parishes often keep Julian Pascha	its own; not modelled
romanian-catholic	Gregorian throughout	its own; not modelled

A church's law is never borrowed from another. Ruthenian particular law is sourced from the Metropolia of Pittsburgh and is reported for that church only. The rest are shown at the Typikon's discipline with nothing reported as binding, because their own law has not been sourced and inventing one would tell a Melkite that fourteen days a year oblige him under a law that was never his. When a church's law is added, its entry will say so and its obligations will appear. A test holds that line.

See the law and the fast for what --typikon does with this, which is the flag most Byzantine Catholics will want.

Ten of the fourteen Byzantine-rite Eastern Catholic churches have no entry of their own. Each keeps one of the three reckonings, and docs/calendars.md sets out which questions decide it.

The fast

Six levels, ordered from strictest to laxest. They are the Typikon's own distinctions, not a simplification of them:

strict	no food until evening
xerophagy	no oil, no wine; no meat, fish, eggs or dairy
wine_oil	wine and oil permitted
fish	fish, wine and oil permitted
dairy	dairy, eggs and fish permitted; no meat
none	no fast

A calendar that reports xerophagy and wine-and-oil both as "fasting" has thrown away the information its reader wanted.

Level and obligation are separate questions. The Orthodox Church legislates fasting as tradition rather than as precept, so every Orthodox day here reports as customary. The Eastern Catholic churches do have law about it, and it requires very much less than the Typikon describes, so those jurisdictions report both the level at which the day is kept and the minimum that actually binds. A calendar saying "obligatory" where nothing obliges is worse than no calendar; one reporting only the binding minimum makes the obligatory days look laxer than the voluntary ones beside them.

The law and the fast are not the same question

For an Eastern Catholic church the two come apart sharply, and reporting only the law makes the Great Fast look like four days of abstinence a year. That is what binds; it is not what is kept.

What the law requires, which is the first four days of the Great Fast:

$ typikon -j ruthenian --no-typikon --days 4 --date 2026-02-16

  Byzantine Catholic Metropolia of Pittsburgh · Ruthenian particular law

  🥬 Mon 16 Feb* no meat, fish, eggs or dairy    Clean Monday — the first day of the…
  🥬 Tue 17 Feb  no meat, fish, eggs or dairy    The Holy Great Martyr Theodore the…
  🥬 Wed 18 Feb* no meat, fish, eggs or dairy    Our Holy Father Leo the Great, Pope…
  🥬 Thu 19 Feb  no meat, fish, eggs or dairy    The Holy Apostles Archippus and…

  * obligatory. Everything unmarked is customary and does not bind.

And what is kept, with --typikon:

$ typikon -j ruthenian --typikon --days 4 --date 2026-02-16

  Byzantine Catholic Metropolia of Pittsburgh · the Typikon, obliging under Ruthenian particular law

  ⛔ Mon 16 Feb* no food until evening           Clean Monday — the first day of the…
  🫒 Tue 17 Feb  wine and oil permitted          The Holy Great Martyr Theodore the…
  🥬 Wed 18 Feb* xerophagy — no oil or wine      Our Holy Father Leo the Great, Pope…
  🥬 Thu 19 Feb  xerophagy — no oil or wine      The Holy Apostles Archippus and…

  * obligatory. Everything unmarked is customary and does not bind.

The same three days are starred in both. That is the point: the flag changes what is kept, not what binds. Tuesday relaxes to wine and oil because St Theodore the Recruit is of polyeleos rank, which is the menologion doing its work.

--no-typikon forces the law back, for when the config remembers otherwise. Either way it is a no-op for a jurisdiction already reckoning by the Typikon.

Where usages differ (Great Thursday, the Exaltation, Lazarus Saturday), this follows the common published rule and names it in the day's reason so you can disagree with it. Monastic practice, and the Holy Mountain in particular, is stricter than all of it. A calendar cannot settle that; your bishop and your spiritual father can.

Output

$ typikon --days 7                       # for a person
$ typikon --format json --days 7         # for a bar, a widget, a script
$ typikon --format ics --days 365 > orthodox.ics

The calendar is thinned to the days worth marking: a subscription that fills all 365 squares is one nobody keeps. --every-day is for the other kind of reader, who wants the saint of each morning and does not mind a full year. Either way the description carries the day's commemorations, the fast and its reason, and where the day sits in the year.

$ typikon -j ruthenian --days 467 --ics --every-day > byzantine.ics

Delimited output, for a spreadsheet or a pipeline. RFC 4180 quoting, one header row, one row per day:

$ typikon -j rocor --date 2026-03-16 --days 3 --format csv \
      --fields date,church_date,fast,title

date,church_date,fast,title
2026-03-16,3 March,xerophagy,"The Holy Martyrs Eutropius, Cleonicus and Basiliscus"
2026-03-17,4 March,xerophagy,Our Venerable Father Gerasimus of the Jordan
2026-03-18,5 March,xerophagy,The Holy Martyr Conon

A year's key dates, to check against the one your parish prints:

$ typikon --year 2027 -j goarch

  2027 · Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America

    publican pharisee    2027-02-21  Sun
    meatfare             2027-03-07  Sun
    cheesefare           2027-03-14  Sun
    clean monday         2027-03-15  Mon
    great fast end       2027-04-23  Fri
    lazarus saturday     2027-04-24  Sat
    palm sunday          2027-04-25  Sun
    great friday         2027-04-30  Fri
    pascha               2027-05-02  Sun
    …

Outside the Triodion and the Pentecostarion, whose Sundays carry names, week says where the day falls in the count from Pentecost: the 32nd Sunday after Pentecost, or the 32nd week after Pentecost on the days between. It is a column in the delimited formats and a line in the single-day view.

Every day of vigil rank or above carries the mark its books print beside it: ⊕ for a great feast, ✚ for a vigil, ☩ for a polyeleos. It is the sign field in the JSON and a column in the delimited formats.

--no-emoji drops the glyphs from every format, for a terminal or a bar without them. --list-fields prints the columns csv and tsv can take, and --fields picks a subset in the order you name them. --json and --ics still work as shorthand.

The JSON shape is flat and stable. Front ends are the thing most likely to be written by someone else, and a schema that shifts underneath them is a bad neighbour.

$ typikon -j rocor --date 2026-03-18 --json --indent 2
{
  "date": "2026-03-18",
  "weekday": "Wednesday",
  "jurisdiction": "rocor",
  "calendar": "old",
  "churchDate": "5 March",
  "season": "Great Fast",
  "cycle": null,
  "week": null,
  "feast": null,
  "rank": null,
  "sign": null,
  "tradition": "slavic",
  "title": "The Holy Martyr Conon",
  "commemorations": [
    "The Holy Martyr Conon"
  ],
  "fast": "xerophagy",
  "fastLabel": "xerophagy — no oil or wine",
  "emoji": "🥬",
  "reason": "a weekday of the Great Fast",
  "obligation": "customary",
  "binds": null,
  "pascha": "2026-04-12",
  "daysToPascha": 25,
  "julianOffset": 13
}

One day is an object; several are {"days": [...]}.

As a library

use typikon::calendars::Date;
use typikon::day::describe;
use typikon::jurisdictions::resolve;

let rocor = resolve(Some("rocor"))?;
let day = describe(Date::from_ymd(2026, 9, 18).unwrap(), rocor);

day.church_date;     // "5 September"
day.fast;            // Level::Xerophagy
day.title();         // "The Holy Prophet Zachariah, father of the Forerunner"
day.is_obligatory(); // false

typikon::paschalion::julian_pascha(2027);     // 2027-05-02
typikon::paschalion::gregorian_pascha(2027);  // 2027-03-28

The levels are an ordered enum, strictest first, so a < b reads as "a is stricter than b" and a feast can only ever relax a fast:

Level::Xerophagy.relaxed_to(Level::Fish, Level::WineOil)  // WineOil: no saint
                                                          // brings fish into Lent
Level::Fish.relaxed_to(Level::WineOil, Level::WineOil)    // Fish: never tightens

From Python

import datetime, typikon

day = typikon.describe(datetime.date(2026, 9, 18))

day.church_date     # '5 September'
day.fast            # 'xerophagy'
day.title           # 'The Holy Prophet Zachariah, father of the Forerunner'
day.is_obligatory() # False

typikon.today()
typikon.pascha(2027)                                  # datetime.date(2027, 5, 2)
typikon.week(datetime.date(2026, 4, 12), 7)           # seven consecutive days
typikon.describe(d, jurisdiction='rocor')
[j['key'] for j in typikon.jurisdictions()]

Dates in and out are datetime.date. to_dict() gives exactly the fields --json gives, so anything already reading the CLI's output can read a Day without changing shape — there is a test that holds the two to that.

Given no jurisdiction=, the library reads the same configured default the command line does. Calling the engine's own resolver instead would have quietly answered for a different church than typikon --set-default selected, which is the kind of disagreement nobody notices until a fast day is wrong.

The wheel is abi3, so one build serves every Python from 3.9 up. It ships py.typed and a stub file, and mypy --strict is clean against it.

From C, and anything with an FFI

cargo build --release --features capi   # target/release/libtypikon.so
cc -Iinclude yours.c -ltypikon

#include <typikon.h>

typikon_day *d = typikon_describe(typikon_today(), "rocor");
if (!d) { fputs(typikon_last_error(), stderr); return 1; }

typikon_day_church_date(d);    /* "5 September" */
typikon_day_fast(d);           /* "xerophagy" */
typikon_day_emoji(d);          /* the glyph for the level */
typikon_day_title(d);          /* the feast, else the principal commemoration */
typikon_day_is_obligatory(d);  /* 0 */

typikon_day_free(d);

Dates cross the boundary as Julian Day Numbers, so no struct layout is part of the ABI and there is nothing for a caller to keep in step; typikon_jdn_from_ymd converts. A day is opaque and owns its strings: an accessor returns the same borrowed pointer every time, so reading one in a render loop allocates nothing, and nothing it returns should be freed. NULL from an accessor means the day has no such field, which is not an error. A call that can fail returns NULL or 0 and leaves a message in typikon_last_error().

include/typikon.h is the whole surface: it carries every field of the JSON, so a statusline does not need a parser. examples/c/demo.c is a working one.

From Lua

examples/lua/typikon.lua is a LuaJIT FFI binding, for AwesomeWM, WezTerm, Neovim and anything else that embeds LuaJIT and should not be spawning a process on every redraw.

local typikon = require("typikon")

local day = assert(typikon.today({ jurisdiction = "rocor" }))
day.church_date   -- "5 September"
day.fast          -- "xerophagy"
day.title         -- "The Holy Prophet Zachariah, father of the Forerunner"
day.commemorations

From JavaScript and TypeScript

npm install typikon

import { today } from "typikon";

const day = today({ jurisdiction: "rocor" });

day.churchDate;   // "5 September"
day.fast;         // "xerophagy"
day.emoji;        // the glyph for the level
day.title;        // "The Holy Prophet Zachariah, father of the Forerunner"
day.season;       // null in ordinary time
day.daysToPascha;

import { describe, describeIso, week, pascha, jurisdictions } from "typikon";

describeIso("2026-04-12", { jurisdiction: "moscow" });
describe(new Date(), { jurisdiction: "goarch", tradition: "greek" });
week(new Date(), 7, { jurisdiction: "oca" });   // seven consecutive days
pascha(2027, "old");                            // 2027-05-02

It is WebAssembly, so it is one package for Node, Deno, Bun, a browser and anything built on them, with no native build to go wrong. Node loads it itself; in a browser or a bundler, await init() first. A day comes back as a plain object, not a handle: the same document --json emits, with nothing to free and JSON.stringify working on it. TypeScript types ship with the package and tsc --strict is clean against them.

There is no remembered default here, because a browser has nowhere to keep one: the default is the New Calendar, and anything else is passed. That is the only place this binding differs from the others.

The menologion

The fixed calendar ships as data and is indexed by ecclesiastical date, so one file serves every jurisdiction. An old-calendar church and a new-calendar church both keep the Nativity on 25 December; they disagree about which morning that is, and that disagreement lives in the calendar conversion, not in the data.

data/menologion.json, compiled into the binary, covers all 366 days with the principal commemorations of the common Byzantine tradition, ranked so the fasting rules know when a feast lifts a Wednesday. It was composed for this project and is under the same licence as the code. It is a working set, not a complete Synaxarion; additions are welcome.

Some churches also keep their own saints, and those lists are usually published by a body that holds the copyright in the wording. Those are not shipped. Fetch one onto your own machine instead:

$ typikon --list-menaia
$ typikon --update-menaion ruthenian

It lands in ~/.local/share/typikon/ and is overlaid automatically.

Further reading

• docs/calendars.md sets out which churches keep which reckoning, how the split came about, what is modelled here and what is not.
• docs/versioning.md says what counts as the public surface, and how a correction to the calendar itself is announced.
• CHANGELOG.md carries those announcements.

Accuracy

typikon is pinned against published calendars: the paschalion for eleven named years and its invariants across the two centuries from 1900, 146,000 calendar round-trips from 1800 to 2200, the fast on every day that is not open to interpretation, and every jurisdiction over the twenty-one years from 2020. Every title the program can print is cut at every width it can be asked to print at, because that is where it once crashed.

It is a calendar, not an authority. If it disagrees with the one your parish prints, your parish is right. Please open an issue.

Front ends

menologion: desktop widgets for Hyprland (Quickshell), waybar and eww, all reading the JSON above.

Licence

GPL-2.0-only. The source for any published release is the source distribution beside it on PyPI, and Cargo.lock pins every dependency to an exact version. See LICENSE. The menologion is under it too; data/LICENSE says so and notes what the fetched sets are not.