ABSTRACT
The church and agrarian calendars, which in the course of Christianization gradually merged, served as the basic grounds for time-reckoning in pre-modern Europe. In Russian Orthodox Karelia, the church calendar with its regular sequences of ordinary (arki) days, days of fast and holy days, together with fixed seasonal work periods fundamentally structured people’s use of time. This is to a certain extent reflected in the vernacular names of the months and the annual arki, non-fasting periods, which refer to the agricultural activity of the time period, such as cutting down forest for slash and burn cultivation (huuhta), hay-making, sowing and harvesting.
