Menaion

The Menaion (Greek: Μηναῖον; Slavonic: Минїѧ[1], Miniya, "of the month") is the liturgical book used by the Eastern Orthodox Church[note 1] containing the propers for fixed dates of the calendar year, i.e. entities not dependent of the date of Pascha.

Part of a series on the
Eastern Orthodox Church
Overview

The Menaion is the largest volume of the propers for the Byzantine Rite and is used at nearly all the daily services.

Editions
A Menaion in the Church Slavonic language, 12th century, Novgorod

The complete Menaion is published in twelve volumes, one for each month; the first volume is for September which commences the Byzantine liturgical year.

The Festal Menaion is an abridged version containing texts for those great feasts falling on the fixed cycle, some editions also containing feasts of the major saints.

The General Menaion contains services for each type of celebration (apostles, martyrs, etc.) with blank spaces for the name of the saint(s) commemorated. Originating before the invention of printing when the enormous volume of the complete Menaion could not be copied for every church, this is still used for saints that do not have complete services, e.g., for the patron feast of a church named after a minor saint; it is also used by missions and parishes unable to afford a complete Menaion.

Supplementary volumes to the Menaion exist for local saints, e.g., one for all the Saints of the Kiev Caves Monastery, or for newly canonized saints or icons which have their own locally observed feasts.

Calendar

Since 1921, there have been two calendars in use within the Orthodox Church: the Julian Calendar and the Revised Julian Calendar.[note 2] As of this century there is a thirteen-day difference between the two calendars, so where the former is used, any given fixed date occurs thirteen days later than where the latter is used, e.g., Christmas is fixed on December 25, but where the Julian calendar is used, that date falls on what is commonly known as January 7. The date of Pascha, however, is everywhere reckoned using the Julian Calendar, resulting in differing interactions between the Paschal cycle and the fixed cycle, e.g. the Annunciation may fall as late as Bright Wednesday where the Julian Calendar is used but only as late as the Thursday before Palm Sunday where the revised calendar is used.

Icons
Russian icon with menaion (ru: минея)

The term "Menaion" is also applied to icons of all the saints whose feast days fall within a particular month. A particular church may have 12 such icons, one for each month of the year, or it may have one large icon depicting all 12 months on one panel.

gollark: I don't actually have a car, but it seems like with the increasing amount of computers in them and requirements for mobile connectivity and such in them, they're moving away from this.
gollark: Generally, I think my things should do what I want and not enforce artificial lockouts on things, randomly break unrepairably, report data back to whoever, run unauditable proprietary software, or do weird stuff in the background.
gollark: Oh, and if I remember right all Teslas are constantly connected over the mobile network to Tesla and can refuse to work if you don't do software updates.
gollark: * one model of car, I mean
gollark: They also had a perfect* and flawless** design where in one car, their console or something had a flash chip in it which could not be replaced and which their terrible software wore out really fast.

See also

Notes
  1. and those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite
  2. which is aligned with the Gregorian Calendar

References
  1. "Минея, сентябрь ~ Menaion, September". Богослужебные тексты ~ Liturgical Texts. Библиотека святоотеческой литературы ~ Library of Patristic Literature. Retrieved 2020-05-28.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.