SECTION SIX

THE FESTAL SERVICES

§ 119. General Teaching on the Festivals. By festal days, feasts or festivals, we mean those days which are dedicated to the commemoration of a sacred event or a sacred personage in the Church’s history, and these days are kept so that the faithful may be instructed in the meaning of event commemorated or so that they might be encouraged to emulate the life of the saint. So it is that on every day of the year we commemorate a particular saint, and oftentimes several saints. One might say, then, that every day is in some sort a feast day. However, in the whole range of sacred events and saints, which the Church commemorates, there are some which are of particular significance for the Christian, and their days the Church designates “feast days,” and according to the typicon these feastdays are ranked as great, middle-ranking, or lesser.

On the Great Feasts the services are particularly solemn. On the eve of the day itself, a Vigil Service is celebrated (properly preceded by Little Vespers, although in parish use this is usually omitted). Ten or eight verses are appointed to be chanted on “Lord, I have cried.” The polyeleos is chanted, and in the Russian practice a magnification of the event or saint being celebrated. The Great Doxology is also chanted. On these days the Church and the state [this was the case in Imperial Russia when Fr Antonov wrote, but not, alas, in our bold New Labour Britain! - ed.] free everyone from their other responsibilities, so that they may devote their time wholly to prayer, to the reading of the word of God, and to attendance at the Divine services. The greatest feasts include Pascha and the Twelve Great Feasts. The latter are designated in the typicon with a special sign, an encircled cross. These feasts also have forefeasts and afterfeasts - these are the days which precede and follow the feastday itself and are dedicated to the feast and on which hymns relating to the celebration are sung.

The middle-ranking feasts are marked in the books with a cross, without the circle round it. These include such days as that of the holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian, Saint Nicolas the Wonderworker, the Protection of the All-holy Mother of God, and the like. The services are somewhat less festive than those of the Great Feasts, and there is a degree of variation in the way they are ordered. Some of the middle-ranking feasts do have a polyeleos on Mattins, but they are not generally celebrated with a Vigil.

The lesser feasts are marked with a sign made of three dots and a semicircular shape, sometimes in red and sometimes in black. Among these feasts we have the Procession of the Honourable Wood of the Cross (1st /14th August), that of the Holy Mandilion (16th/29th August), &c. These feasts do not have a polyeleos, and they are distinguished from “ordinary” days simply by the number of verses appointed for the saint or event, and by the fact that we sing the Great Doxology. On these days it is always sung, rather than read as on ordinary days, and during it the Royal Gates are open.