A leap year with 355 days

Leap year with 355 days

The title of this topic sounds weird, but do you know its a truth. There is a year in British empire history, in fact a leap year, which had only 355 days. 

Ideally,

• A simple year has 365 days
• And a leap year has 366 days.

                                                                            photo credit

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII as a leader of the Catholic church had problem with Easter. At that time, the Catholic church used Julian calendar. As per that a year had 365 days and 6 hours and all the dates were set accordingly. But, due to improvement in Space science, it was concluded that a year has 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes. These two sounds almost similar in numbers, but a huge gap was created over a period of 1500 years, (gap of 11 minutes for 1500+ years)

So, on Feb 24, 1582, a papal bull(an edict issued by a pope.) was released by Pope Gregory XIII that the regions which comes under Catholic church need to skip few days, and calendar named as new Gregorian calendar.

British was a large empire at that time and didn't followed this new calendar along with few other countries. So, this lead to following issues:

• Easter setting issues.
• People used to write two dates on letters to keep things in sync.
• Issues in Legal method of Scotland as the rest of the empire was on old style calendar.

In 1907, eventually Britain government also admitted that these two style of calendars are creating diverse inconvenience and agreed to follow New Gregorian calendar. It took them almost 50 years to make it a real deal. 

And finally, in 1752, in month of September, 11 days(September 3 to 13) were skipped and the life went on. Britain was not the last holdout in this.

• Russia did that change in 1918
• Greece in 1923

But, they skipped 13 days instead of 11 to cover huge gap of this small time over 1900 years.

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