Right now, while the rest of the world lives in 2026, Ethiopia is in 2018.
Not a joke. Not a metaphor. The official state calendar of Ethiopia — used by its 120 million people, its government, its courts, and its schools — is the Ge'ez calendar, which runs 7 to 8 years behind the Gregorian calendar most of the world uses.
Ethiopia celebrated the millennium on September 12, 2007. When the rest of the world was watching the global financial crisis unfold.
How the calendar works:
The Ge'ez calendar has 13 months. Twelve months of exactly 30 days each, plus a 13th month called Pagumē — which has 5 days (or 6 in a leap year). That 13th month's name comes from the Greek word for "days forgotten when a year is calculated."
Each leap year is named after a biblical evangelist: the John year, then the Matthew year, then the Mark year.
New Year's Day falls on September 11 (or September 12 before a Gregorian leap year). It's called Enkutatash, meaning "gift of jewels."
Why the 7-year gap?
Both calendars use the birth of Jesus as their starting point, but they disagree on when exactly that happened. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church follows an older calculation — based on the early Church Fathers — that places the Annunciation roughly 7 to 8 years after the date Western Christianity settled on.
The method for calculating these dates is called Bahere Hasab — Amharic for "sea of thoughts."
And time works differently too. Ethiopia doesn't use a standard 24-hour clock. Instead, the day is split into two 12-hour cycles: dawn to dusk, then dusk to dawn. When it's 7am Gregorian time, Ethiopians call it 1 o'clock — one hour after sunrise.
Ethiopia is one of only a handful of countries that was never colonised by a European power. It didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar because nobody imposed it. The Ge'ez calendar is still here because Ethiopia kept it.