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In Ethiopia, it's still 2019 — and the year has 13 months
💡 Ethiopia keeps its own Ge'ez calendar — about 7 years behind the Gregorian one, with 13 months — because it uses an older calculation of when Jesus was born.
If you flew to Addis Ababa today, the calendar on the wall wouldn't just show a different date — it would show a different year. Ethiopia follows its own Ge'ez calendar, which runs roughly seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar most of the world uses. Ethiopians famously celebrated the new millennium in September 2007. This isn't about isolation or being 'behind the times' — it comes from an older, different calculation of the date of the Annunciation (the announcement of Jesus's birth), which shifts the entire count.
The structure is unusual too. The Ethiopian year has 13 months: twelve tidy months of 30 days each, plus a short 13th month called Pagumē with just 5 days (6 in a leap year) to catch up with the solar year. Because every regular month is the same length, dates line up neatly — the 8th is always a week after the 1st. Tourism boards have leaned into this, marketing the country as offering '13 months of sunshine.'
The Ethiopian New Year, Enkutatash, falls around September 11, at the end of the long rains when the highlands burst into yellow daisies. So while much of the world sees one number on the calendar, Ethiopia keeps time by a system that predates and quietly ignores the global standard.