Oh My Days! Where Does Our Calendar Come From?

Does the working week sometimes seem a drag while you wait to have fun at the weekend?

Well count your lucky stars you didn’t live in Roman times, when a week was eight days long!

The calendar you use on your phone today (like the one on your wall) is a Gregorian calendar, dating back to 1582.

It’s named after Pope Gregory XIII, who decreed there should be a change in the Julian calendar which had been around since before the birth of Christ.

The Julian calendar (introduced by Julius Caesar) was based on the assumption that the duration of a year was 365.25 days. It was more accurate than the Roman calendar. But it still over-estimated the length of a year by 11 minutes.

To deal with this, the Gregorian calendar had three leap days removed in every 400 years. Changes were also made to the lunar cycle, to help in the calculation of Easter.

Many countries in Europe resisted the Gregorian calendar when it was introduced, mainly because of the Protestant Reformation that was taking place. But today, it is the most widely used calendar in the world.