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Re: Calendars -- Gregorian and Julian



On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, J. Peter Vajk wrote:

For those of us old enough to remember Moscow's "October Revolution"
parades in Red Square, this explians why they were held in November --
Russia did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until after the Bolsheviks
seized power in 1917 -- the Red revolution took place in (late October,
1917/Julian).

One of my hobbies is stamp collecting, specializing in Finland, which
switched to the Gregorian calendar while it was a province of Sweden.
Then in the early 1800s, as a byproduct of the Napoleonic wars, it became
a grand duchy of the Russian Empire, but did not switch back to the Julian
calendar as a result. It is very common to find letters from the 1800s
from, say, Helsinki to St. Petersburg, postmarked in both cities, but
apparently several days earlier at the destination than at the origin.

(Remember the quote from Rutherford? "All science is physics, the rest is
just stamp collecting." I sometimes joke that that must mean that I know
everything.)

--
Jon Bell <jtbell@presby.edu> Presbyterian College
Dept. of Physics and Computer Science Clinton, South Carolina USA