The week after Pentecost is called the Afterfeast of Pentecost. It’s a continuation of the feast itself, not a return to ordinary time.
Think of it like Bright Week after Pascha. We don’t celebrate Easter Sunday and then immediately move on. We keep celebrating for eight days. Pentecost works the same way. The feast is too big to contain in one day, so we stretch it out across the week that follows.
Monday: The Day of the Holy Spirit
The day immediately after Pentecost has its own name. We call it the Synaxis of the Holy Spirit. A synaxis is a gathering or assembly, and on this day we gather specifically to honor the Third Person of the Trinity. We sing many of the same hymns we sang on Pentecost Sunday. The liturgy feels almost identical.
If you come to church that Monday expecting everything to shift back to normal, you’ll be surprised. We’re still very much in Pentecost mode. The red vestments stay out. The festal tone continues.
A Fast-Free Week
Here’s something practical: you don’t fast during this week. Even though Wednesday and Friday fall in it, we suspend the usual fasting rules. The whole week is treated as a feast, which means we eat normally throughout.
For those of you coming from Baptist or non-denominational backgrounds, this might seem like a strange detail to mention. But in Orthodox life, fasting is the norm. We fast most Wednesdays and Fridays all year long, plus four major fasting seasons. So when we say a week is fast-free, that’s significant. It marks the time as special.
If you work rotating shifts at one of the refineries around Beaumont and you’re trying to figure out when you can and can’t eat what, this week is simple. Eat whatever you want. It’s a feast.
How Long Does It Last?
The Afterfeast of Pentecost runs until the Saturday after Pentecost. That Saturday is called the Leave-taking, or Apodosis in Greek. It’s the formal conclusion of the feast. We sing the Pentecost hymns one last time, and then we move forward.
The Sunday after Pentecost is All Saints Sunday. This isn’t random scheduling. There’s a theological connection. The Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost, and the first fruit of the Spirit’s work in the Church is the saints. All of them, from the apostles to the martyrs to St. Seraphim of Sarov to your grandmother if she died in the faith. We celebrate them all together on that first Sunday after the Spirit comes.
After that, we start counting. Second Sunday after Pentecost. Third Sunday after Pentecost. We’ll keep counting all the way until next Lent begins. The whole rest of the year is measured from Pentecost.
Why This Matters
If you’re used to thinking of church feasts as single days, this takes some getting used to. Christmas, Pentecost, Pascha, these aren’t 24-hour events in Orthodoxy. They’re extended celebrations that shape entire weeks.
This isn’t just liturgical fussiness. It’s about letting the reality of what we’re celebrating actually sink in. The Holy Spirit descended on the Church. That’s not a historical fact we acknowledge and move past. It’s the ongoing reality we live in. The Spirit is still here, still active, still making the Church what it is.
So we take a whole week to let that settle into our bones. We pray the same prayers multiple times. We hear the same Gospel readings. We sing the same hymns until they’re not just words anymore but something we’ve internalized.
And we don’t fast, because you don’t fast at a wedding feast. The Bridegroom is with us. The Spirit has come. There’s nothing to do but celebrate.
If you’ve never experienced this week, come to services during it. Monday especially. You’ll see what it means for a feast to have an afterfeast, and you’ll understand a little better how Orthodox time works. We don’t rush. We let things unfold at the pace they need to unfold at. Even if that means singing the same kontakion for eight days straight.
