About Eikon

What Eikon is

Eikon presents the lectionary of the Eastern Orthodox Church — the Church's daily rhythm of scripture, saints and fasting — for any date. It follows the new (Revised Julian) calendar and the practice of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland, and is made by a member of one of its parishes. For each day you'll find the saints commemorated, the appointed scripture readings in full, the fasting discipline, the tone of the week, and the season of the Church year, alongside a library of prayers and a guide to the fasts.

The Antiochian character runs through each day's page: the commemoration the Archdiocese leads with appears in bold at the top of the day's saints, and the saints of the British Isles and Ireland remembered that day are listed alongside.

An independent project

This is a private project. I am an Orthodox Christian living in England who works in technology with artificial intelligence, and I make this in a personal capacity.

It is not an official publication of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland. It is not endorsed by the Archdiocese, and it has not been approved by the bishop as an official source. Nothing here carries any authority in matters of faith, and nothing here should be taken as the mind of the Church. For the Archdiocese's own calendar and teaching, look to the Archdiocese itself and to your parish priest.

It is also, in part, an experiment: I wanted to find out whether artificial intelligence can genuinely help gather and organise the Church's record of the saints — the lives, the commemorations, the hymns — and make it easy to reach. That experiment concerns the material about the saints. The calendar itself is not an experiment: it is computed from the received tradition of the Church, as described below.

Where the information comes from

The liturgical calendar itself — feasts, readings, tones and fasting rules — is not something anyone invents; it is the received tradition of the Church. Eikon computes it using an engine ported from orthocal, an open-source Orthodox calendar project that follows the pattern of observance of the Orthodox Church in America, and checks its output against that project's published calendar day by day; the Antiochian Archdiocese's own emphases are then laid over that foundation. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version, which is in the public domain.

The Antiochian commemorations and the British Isles and Ireland saints follow the calendar of the Antiochian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland, as published through the Saints and Readings service maintained by the Orthodox parish of St Constantine in York. The icons that illustrate days and saints come from Wikimedia Commons; each one is shown with its attribution and licence.

The lives and overviews of the saints, the feast articles, and the hymn translations — from historical and liturgical sources, from an Antiochian perspective — were researched and written using advanced artificial intelligence. This massive task was not humanly possible, but modern AI enabled this research to be automated. The full story of how that was done — the rules the machine worked under, the human work of designing them, what the machine got wrong along the way, and what remains unverified — is told plainly on its own page: How the AI content was created.

Who makes this

My name is Andy Mayer. I built Eikon and I keep it — on my own initiative, not at the request of any church body. It is built through Nepsis Digital, the small UK studio I run with my wife Nicola, which is why the contact address below is a Nepsis one. The studio's name comes from the Greek nepsis — watchful, clear-headed attentiveness — and its work is building safe digital spaces for the people who need them most; this site is made in the same spirit.

Corrections

If you find an error — in a saint's life, a reading, a date, or anything else — please write to info@neps.is. Reports are read by a person, and fixes usually land quickly. Corrections from clergy and from readers who know these saints better than I do are especially welcome.