find your greek birthday!
Disclaimer: sort of, because ancient Greece sucked at time-keeping, and didn’t even care it sucked.
Seriously: I always low-key wondered why this is a subject no one ever mentioned - no cute Greek calendars in high school, no uni professor shouting out ‘Today it’s Alexander’s birthday, BITCHES’, just a plain waste of nothing at all - and now I finally know the reasons of this very wise silence: Greek calendars were the bureaucratic equivalent of Loki shouting I DO WHAT I WANT out of a limo. As in: every city had its own calendar, and also cities sometimes functioned with two or three different calendars (think one calendar marking religious festivities, and a different one recording political meetings). Also the fun part, and by fun I mean ‘I will personally come there and and make you eat your own liver’, is that the Greeks used a calendar that was both lunar and solar - but unlike normal people, they had zero rules indicating if and where to add extra days to keep the system in balance. Plus, the whole thing could be tweaked for whatever reason - for instance, you could anticipate the start of a holy month to force an enemy to stop fighting, or have week-long months so a foreign king could see all the best celebrations the city had to offer in the space of three or four days.
the good news: the year tended to start in september, which makes sense to me in a very primal way? I don’t know about you guys, but January never feels like the beginning of anything to me. The end of summer, though - that’s the real deal. Days get shorter, there’s sweaters and hot chocolate, the trees are preparing for their death and resurrection, and school starts again. Tick tock.
the bad news: everything fucking else.
Still, if you’d like to know, for personal or fictional purposes, how to calculate your Greek birthday, here is how you do it (though let me stress, again, that you’ll end up with a ‘more or less’ because Greece).
1. Check what the Moon was doing when you were born
Let’s say today’s your birthday (YAY, CAKE!): if you were born on October 14th, 1990, what you want to do first is go on a website like Calendar-12 and search the Moon phases for 1990:
Now, Greek months started with the new Moon (or: they were supposed to start with the new Moon, lol). That means you were born during the month that began on September 19th.
2. Figure out your Greek month
This is the easy part, except every city had its own names for the months. As Greek cities started to join together in federations, the archaic names were abandoned in favour of numbers, so people would stop squabbling over which god had blessed which month. This lasted for about five seconds before everyone got back to their old months, then Macedonian months, and finally the Roman ones. Anyway rough equivalent of our calendar would look like this (traditional months in pink and blue, numbers in yellow):
In your case, that would be ‘the Twelfth Month’, Boedromion or Boathoos, or another dozen of possible names (you can find a list here). The Attic month of Boedromion was dedicated to Apollo Boedromios (’the helper in distress’). I thought for a second it had something to do with cows, but no such luck.
Now, in theory Greek months are 29 or 30 days long, and are divided in three parts: ‘day after the rising’ (1-10), ‘xth day’ (11-20) and ‘day before the waning’ (21-30). That last section was also counted backwards, because why not. If you’re following an Attic calendar, though, the second day of Boedromion was ignored because on that day Athena and Poseidon had their big fight over Attica and It’s Not Something We Talk About (Except in All Those Legends And Vases and Murals), so October 14th would actually be October 13th.
That brings you to that 25th day of the month, which means your Greek birthday is ‘in the month of Apollo Protector, on the sixth day of the waning’. Congrats!
(As for the year - ancient calendars were fond of using rulers’ reigns to tell the time. If you’re American, 1990 would probably be known as ‘the second year of the Bush’ or something like that.)
The names of the months for every Greek city
More complicated stuff about calendars (search for ‘calendarium’)
75 pictures of smiling puppies because this stuff is messy, I’m sorry
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