Where the Texts Come From
The provenance of every prayer, rubric and reading in the corpus, how each is reviewed, and what the Service borrows from others.
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Why this page exists
A prayer book that does not say where its texts come from is asking to be trusted without giving a reason. Every text in Eastodox records its source book, its translation, the tradition its rubrics follow, and whether a priest has reviewed it. This page explains that record and the rules behind the calendar.
The service books
The corpus is drawn from the traditional service books of the Orthodox Church. The texts themselves are ancient and belong to nobody; the English translations are either in the public domain, used with the permission of their translators or publishers, or written for Eastodox. Where a translation is under copyright and permission has not been given, it is not used.
| Book | What it supplies |
|---|---|
| Horologion | The fixed portions of the Hours, the Trisagion prayers, the psalms of each hour, the morning and evening prayers |
| Octoechos | The eight-tone cycle: the Resurrection troparia and kontakia, the weekday propers and theotokia |
| Menaion | The fixed calendar: the commemoration, troparion and kontakion of each day of the year |
| Triodion | The Lenten cycle, from the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee to Holy Saturday |
| Pentecostarion | The paschal cycle, from Pascha to the Sunday of All Saints |
| Psalter | The twenty kathismata and their appointed places through the week |
| Typikon | The rules that decide which of the above is used when they conflict, and the fasting rule |
| Lectionary | The appointed Epistle and Gospel for each day, following the common Byzantine cycle |
The calendar and the fasting rule
The date of Pascha is computed by the Julian Paschalion, which every Orthodox church except Finland and Estonia still uses, so Old and New Calendar readers keep Pascha on the same civil day. The fixed cycle of feasts and commemorations is read on the calendar you choose: thirteen days behind the civil date for the Julian (Old Style) calendar, on the civil date for the Revised Julian (New Style). The moveable cycle follows Pascha on either.
The fasting rule follows the common reading of the Typikon: the Wednesday and Friday fast through the year; Great Lent and the Dormition Fast kept with oil and wine on Saturday and Sunday; the Nativity and Apostles’ Fasts with fish on Saturday and Sunday; and the strict fast of the Exaltation of the Cross and the Beheading of the Forerunner on whatever weekday they fall. A Great Feast within a fast relaxes it to fish; outside a fast, it lifts the weekly fast. Where jurisdictions differ, the application follows the Typikon and says so on the fasting screen; your own parish and your spiritual father govern your practice.
Review status
Each text carries one of the following review statuses, and each review is recorded with the name of the reviewer and the date. Whether a text is shown is recorded separately from its review. Some texts are shown before their review is complete, among them many of the lives of the saints, and they stay shown while they wait. A text that a reviewer marks as not approved for public use, or to be removed or replaced, is taken out of the application at once.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Approved | Reviewed by a priest and approved for use as it stands |
| Approved with corrections | Approved, with changes made as the reviewer directed |
| Pending | In the corpus and not yet reviewed. It may be shown while it waits |
| Needs correction | Reviewed and returned for correction, to be reviewed again once corrected |
| Not approved for public use | Withdrawn from the application |
| Remove or replace | Withdrawn from the application, to be removed or replaced with another text |
Every change to a text, a rubric or a commemoration is recorded with who made it and when, so a reading can always be traced to the version that was reviewed.
What is not here yet
The corpus is being built, and it is built office by office rather than all at once. Where an office has no text yet, the application says so plainly rather than showing an empty page as though the office were short. The lives of the saints, the canons and the akathists are being added as they pass review.
What the Service borrows from others
The typefaces, icons and marks in Eastodox that somebody else made, and the libraries the applications use to sell the subscription and to open links, with the terms each is used under. The other open-source software the website and the applications are built on, among it React and Flutter, is used under its own licences.
| Asset | Made by | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Cormorant Garamond (typeface) | Catharsis Fonts | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Cinzel (typeface) | Natanael Gama | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Inter (typeface) | Rasmus Andersson | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| EB Garamond and Noto Serif (typefaces) | Georg Duffner; Google | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Lucide (icons) | Lucide contributors | ISC |
| Phosphor Icons (praying hands) | Phosphor Icons | MIT |
| The Google “G” mark on the sign-in button | Used as Google’s branding guidelines require | |
| purchases_flutter (subscriptions in the applications) | RevenueCat, Inc. | MIT |
| url_launcher (opening links from the applications) | The Flutter team | BSD 3-Clause |
The typefaces are bundled with the applications rather than fetched from a network, so the prayers render in the right face with no connection and no request to a third party. The Eastodox name, artwork and logo belong to TenuTech or to its licensors, as the Terms of Use explain.