Bahá'í Calendar and Holy Days

The Bahá’í calendar consists of 19 months of 19 days each (ie.361 days), with the addition of certain “intercalary days” (four in ordinary and five in leap years) between the eighteenth and nineteenth in order to adjust the calendar to the solar year. The Báb named the months after the attributes of God. The Bahá’í New Year, like the ancient Persian New Year, is astronomically fixed, commencing at the March equinox (21 March), and the Bahá’í era commences with the year of the Báb’s declaration (ie.AD1844-AH1260).

In the not far distant future it will be necessary that all peoples in the world agree on a common calendar. It seems, therefore, fitting that the new age of unity should have a new calendar free from the objections and associations which make each of the older calendars unacceptable to large sections of the world’s population, and it is difficult to see how any other arrangements could exceed in simplicity and convenience that proposed by the Báb.

J E Esselmont, Baháú’lláh and the New Era,
The Bahá’í Calendar section, pp. 166-167

The Nineteen Day Feast

Bahá’í Holy Days

In addition to the above Holy Days, there are two days that are considered Holy Days on which work is not suspended.

The days of Ayyam-i-Ha are devoted to spiritual preparation for the fast, hospitality, feasting, charity and gift giving.

The Bahá’í Fast

"This material fast is an outer token of the spiritual fast; it is a symbol of self-restraint, the withholding of oneself from all appetites of the self, taking on the characteristics of the spirit, being carried away by the breathings of heaven and catching fire from the love of God." 

"Fasting is the cause of awakening man. The heart becomes tender and the spirituality of man increases. This is produced by the fact that man's thoughts will be confined to the commemoration of God, and through this awakening and stimulation surely ideal advancements follow."

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