Great Lent is forty days long. It starts on Clean Monday and runs continuously for forty days, ending on the Friday before Lazarus Saturday. But that’s not the whole story, and this is where things get interesting.
When you ask most Orthodox Christians how long Lent is, you’ll get different answers depending on what they’re counting. Some will say forty days. Others will say seven weeks. A few will tell you forty-eight days. They’re all right, just measuring different things.
The Forty Days
The heart of Great Lent is those forty days. We call it the Quadragesima (from the Latin for “fortieth”) or Tessaracoste in Greek. It’s modeled directly on Christ’s forty days in the wilderness after His baptism. Forty days of fasting, prayer, and spiritual struggle. That’s the core.
This period begins on Clean Monday. Not Ash Wednesday, we don’t observe that. Clean Monday is when we sweep out the house, literally and spiritually, and begin the fast. From that Monday, you count forty continuous days forward. That takes you through six full weeks and lands you on a Friday. The next day is Lazarus Saturday, when we celebrate Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Then comes Palm Sunday. Then Holy Week begins.
So if someone tells you Great Lent is forty days, they’re speaking precisely. The canonical forty-day fast ends before Holy Week starts.
But What About Holy Week?
Here’s where it gets a bit more complex. Holy Week isn’t technically part of Great Lent. It’s treated as its own distinct period in our liturgical books. The services change completely. The tone shifts. If Great Lent is about our struggle in the wilderness with Christ, Holy Week is about walking with Him to the Cross and the Tomb. Different focus, different services, different rubrics.
But here’s the thing: we don’t stop fasting when Great Lent ends. The fast continues through Holy Week. In fact, it gets stricter. Holy Friday is the strictest fast day of the entire year. So when people talk about “the Lenten fast,” they usually mean the whole stretch from Clean Monday through Holy Saturday, right up until we break the fast at Pascha. That’s where you get the forty-eight-day count: forty days of Great Lent plus the eight days from Lazarus Saturday through Holy Saturday.
Most Orthodox parishes around here in Southeast Texas will talk about “Lent” in that broader sense. When Fr. Michael announces that Lent is coming, he means the whole season of preparation. When your Baptist coworker asks how long you’re giving up meat, you’re probably going to say “until Easter” rather than launch into a lecture about the liturgical distinction between the Quadragesima and Holy Week.
Why Does This Matter?
It matters because the distinction helps us understand what we’re doing. The forty days are about discipline, repentance, and preparation. We’re training. We’re getting ready. Holy Week is different. It’s not preparation anymore, it’s participation. We’re not getting ready for Pascha during Holy Week; we’re living through the events that lead to Pascha. We’re standing at the foot of the Cross on Friday. We’re keeping vigil at the Tomb on Saturday.
The Church keeps these periods distinct liturgically because they serve different purposes in our spiritual life. But she also keeps them connected because they’re part of one continuous movement toward the Resurrection.
The Practical Answer
So how long is Great Lent? Forty days, technically. But if you’re asking how long you’ll be fasting, how long you’ll be attending extra services, how long you’ll be living in that Lenten rhythm, it’s really the whole journey from Clean Monday to Pascha. Call it seven weeks. Call it forty-eight days. Call it the long haul.
What matters isn’t getting the count exactly right. What matters is showing up. Making it to Presanctified Liturgy on Wednesday nights even when you’re tired from your shift at the plant. Keeping the fast even when your family’s having a crawfish boil. Reading the Psalms. Going to confession. Letting this season do its work in you.
The Church gives us these forty days (and then some) because transformation takes time. You can’t become a different person in a weekend. You need weeks of steady effort, of falling and getting back up, of learning to pray when you don’t feel like it. By the time we get to Pascha, we’re not the same people who started on Clean Monday. That’s the point.
If you want to dive deeper into the services and structure of Great Lent, Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s book Great Lent is the classic. It’ll walk you through the whole season week by week, and it’s written in plain English that doesn’t assume you already know everything.
