Saturday Scenes

The 13th of October 1582 might not exist, depending on your location. If you lived in Italy, Poland, Portugal or Spain in 1582, the day simply never happened. In Alaska, the day also went missing, but not until 1867.

Pope Gregory XIII introduced a papal bull to adopt the Gregorian calendar, which is now the most widely accepted civil calendar. The Julian calendar used previously set the time between vernal equinoxes as 365¼ days when it is actually almost 11 minutes shorter, which led to a drift of about three days every 400 years. This was important to the Church, as it led to the Spring equinox falling on the 11th of March instead of the ecclesiastically fixed date of 21st of March, which was used to determine the celebration of Easter.

Four Catholic countries adopted the new calendar on Friday the 15th of October 1582, immediately following the Julian Thursday, the 4th of October. However, many other countries objected to the change.

History Of Our Calendar | Calendars

Ironically, by the time the Catholic church buckled under the weight of the scientific reasoning that pointed out the error, it had lost much of its power to implement the fix. Protestant tract writers responded to Gregory’s calendar by calling him the “Roman Antichrist” and claiming that its real purpose was to keep true Christians from worshiping on the correct days. The “new” calendar, as we know it today, was not adopted uniformly across Europe until well into the 18th century.

In Alaska, Friday the 6th of October in 1867 was followed by Friday the 18th of October. Russia was still on the Julian calendar but the United States wasn’t, so when the US purchased the territory, they shifted Alaska to the Gregorian calendar and moved the International Date line to the other side of the state.

However, do not be alarmed! We have photographic evidence that the 13th of October 2012 took place all over the world:

And here are the regular-as-clockwork Saturday submitters who took them:

• CarolineBignell
• embee
• JanetIsserlis
• evilrooster
• thermalhound
• martin_chrisj
• oxonlady
• ahpilot
• icklemouse
• robdavies
• Pewari
• akrabat
• twasntme
• mousewords
• ClareRevell
• carocat
• CallumDG
• jamesnnb
• SockYarnShop
• elibrody
• ernmander
• craftychai
• UKMelia
• akaSylvia
• dndtsa
• RAFairman
• CliffStanford
• ladyauntiecathy
• max1018
• FrauKulli
• HarryMyhre
• HeideSpruck
• dudleypj
• JLM1974
• DaughterofLir
• Korwhai
• raumsinn
• Krautie

Wouldn’t you like to join us?

It’s easy to take part!

1) Take a photo on a Saturday and upload it to a photo site like Flickr or Twitpic
2) Tweet the url for your photograph to @SatScenes
3) Watch for the next post here to see a great set of all the photographs together.

I’m looking forward to seeing your scenes!