Orthodox Easter (Pascha) · Pascha

Culture of origin: Christian · Cultural

Holiday sources: Eastern Orthodox · Eastern Orthodox (new calendar)

Pascha, the Resurrection of Christ, is the greatest of the Orthodox holy days, the "feast of feasts". Every Orthodox church except Finland's computes its date on the Julian calendar, the new-calendar churches included, so it is sometimes the same Sunday as the Western Easter and otherwise falls in a different week. In Iran, Russian emigrants' donations built St Nicholas Church in Tehran in the early 1940s; it joined the Moscow Patriarchate in 1995. By 1917 there had been about fifty Russian Orthodox churches in Iran. In 1898 Mar Yonan, bishop of Supurghan near Urmia, was received into Orthodoxy in St Petersburg with several of his clergy, and the Russian Church's Holy Synod founded a mission in Urmia for his flock, which lasted until 1918.