Beginning of the Indiction — the Church New Year

The word "indiction" comes from the Latin term originally designating the imposition of taxes in Roman Egypt. The indiction began as a periodic reassessment of taxation, first used in the late third century to date agricultural and land tax cycles. Established around 287 as a five-year cycle, it had evolved into a fifteen-year cycle by 314, the period coinciding with the Emperor Constantine the Great's recognition of Christianity.

Constantine introduced the fifteen-year cycle as an official dating system across the empire in the early fourth century; Orthodox tradition associates the first worldwide indiction with the year 312 and with Constantine's vision of the Cross in the sky. In the Eastern Roman Empire outside Egypt, the indiction year originally began on September 23, the birthday of the Emperor Augustus. During the last half of the fifth century, probably around 462, the start of the year shifted from September 23 to September 1, where it remained for the rest of the Byzantine period and where the Church's year still begins.

The indiction moved beyond taxation to become a general dating convention: its use for documents unrelated to taxes began in the mid-fourth century, and the Emperor Justinian formalized it by administrative decree. Through Novella 47 (537) he required that all dates include the indiction, which reinforced September 1 as the start of the Byzantine year. In this way the indiction was transformed from a fiscal mechanism into an essential component of Byzantine official dating and calendar reckoning, and the Church retained September 1 as the opening of its own year.

Alongside the fiscal history, Orthodox tradition supplies the ecclesiastical rationale for the date. It holds that Christ entered a synagogue on September 1 to unveil His redemptive mission, reading from Isaiah and proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord; and it recalls that the Hebrew people entered the Promised Land in September, establishing a seasonal pattern of renewal and covenant fulfillment. A Vatican manuscript (Cod. Gr. 1613) preserves an image of the synagogue scene, a visual testimony to the moment the day commemorates.

The Church New Year gathers the whole coming cycle of feasts and fasts under the sign of Christ's proclamation of liberation. The passage the Lord read at Nazareth speaks of preaching the gospel to the poor, healing the blind, releasing captives, and freeing the oppressed; the Fathers understand the phrase "the acceptable year of the Lord" not as a single calendar year but as the entire dispensation of grace inaugurated by Christ's Incarnation. To begin the year with this reading is to place the whole year within that time of favor.

The day is thus a celebration of God's redemptive work and of time itself as the arena of salvation. A kontakion traditionally sung on the feast addresses Christ as the King who dwells on high, the Creator and Fashioner of everything visible and invisible, and asks that He bless the crown of the year and guard His city and people in peace, framing the new year as a gift held in the hands of its Maker.

The more recent designation of September 1 as a day of prayer for the protection of the creation draws out a further dimension of the same confession: that the God whom the year celebrates is the Creator of all that is visible and invisible, and that the created order is entrusted to human care. In this light the beginning of the year is at once a remembrance of Christ's saving proclamation and an act of thanksgiving for, and responsibility toward, the world He has made.

A depiction of the day's founding moment is preserved in a Vatican manuscript (Cod. Gr. 1613), which shows Christ in the synagogue at Nazareth reading from the scroll of Isaiah, the scene that Orthodox tradition assigns to September 1.

The services of the day include troparia and kontakia proper to the beginning of the year. A traditional kontakion addresses Christ as the King who dwells on high, the Creator and Fashioner of everything visible and invisible, and asks Him to bless the crown of the year and to guard His city and people in peace, setting the tone of the observance as a petition over the year about to unfold.

Since 1989 the Ecumenical Patriarchate has kept September 1 as a day of prayer for the protection of the natural creation, an observance also called the World Day of Prayer for Creation and now kept in many jurisdictions; Patriarch Bartholomew I's advocacy of it earned him the epithet "the Green Patriarch."

• Isaiah 61:1-2 — The prophecy of the Spirit-anointed servant and the acceptable year of the Lord, read by Christ at Nazareth.
• Luke 4:16-22 — Christ enters the synagogue at Nazareth, reads from Isaiah, and proclaims the fulfillment of the prophecy; tradition connects this with September 1.

September 1 also carries a number of saintly and historical commemorations, among them Saint Symeon the Stylite the Elder (d. 459), the Hieromartyr Firminus of Amiens (c. 303), the Righteous Joshua of Navi of the Old Testament, and forty ascetic virgin-martyrs at Heraclea in Thrace.

The day further commemorates the Great Fire of Constantinople (c. 470) and the Synaxis of the Most-Holy Theotokos of Miasena Monastery, kept in memory of the finding of her icon in 864.