On the night of December 31 to January 1, we habitually raise our glasses and celebrate the beginning of the New Year. Our fun and little festive atrocities would be very glad for Peter I, thanks to whom we celebrate this truly national holiday - New Year. However, before his reign, both the date of the current year and the day of the next one were calculated in a completely different way.
Where did our reckoning come from
Emperor Peter I borrowed a lot from Europe: shaving beards, smoking tobacco, a regular army, but his most global innovation was a change in the system of reckoning. That date, which we now consider the beginning of the new year, began to count from the first of January 1700. Before the revolution, 17 years after the mention of the date, they necessarily said "from the Nativity of Christ" and this is the fundamental difference between the new chronology and that which was earlier when the years were considered "from the creation of the world."
The most interesting thing is that the European chronology borrowed by Peter I, and in Europe itself was not adopted immediately, but at the end of the XVI century by decree of Pope Gregory.
The date introduced by the Bolsheviks according to the "new style", which we use now, is precisely the reckoning according to the Gregorian calendar.
Only since 1582, Europe celebrates the New Year in a similar way.
One of the points of indictment brought against the Copernicus by the Inquisition was his disagreement with the introduction of calculating the date from Christmas.
As years considered earlier
The way the chronology was conducted in Russia until January 1700 is customarily called the "Old Slavonic calendar." But this is fundamentally the wrong opinion. The church could not calculate the date according to the pagan calendar, therefore, it calculated the years according to the same principle as in the Byzantine Empire, from which Orthodoxy came to Russia. The country, which is our spiritual ancestress, counted the years from the creation of the world. According to the Byzantine calendar, Christ was born 5508 years after the creation of Adam.
In the reckoning, politics intervened more than once. For example, the Church of Antioch believed that Christ was born 8 years earlier, and the Byzantine date was adopted only for the convenience of calculating the date of Easter.
There were also different interpretations of the date of the New Year in Russia: the church believed that it was coming on September 1, and according to the civil calendar, the year began on March 25, the day God created the first woman - Eve.
March 25 is celebrated with the Annunciation - the date when the Virgin Mary learned that she would give birth to Christ.
Peter, with his characteristic straightforwardness, solved this question simply, bringing everything to a common denominator - the first of January.
