Store Bededag, translated literally as Great Prayer Day or more loosely as General Prayer Day, "All Prayers" Day, Great Day of Prayers or Common Prayer Day, is a Danish holiday celebrated on the 4th Friday after Easter. It is also celebrated in the Faroe Islands, where it is called Dýri biðidagur.
It is a collection of minor Christian holy days consolidated into one day. The day was introduced in the Church of Denmark in 1686 by King Christian V as a consolidation of several minor (or local) Roman Catholic holidays which the Church observed that had survived the Reformation. Store Bededag is a statutory holiday in Denmark. It was one of the few holidays that survived in the great holiday reform that was carried out in 1771 during the reign of Christian VII, when his Prime Minister, Count Johann Friedrich von Struensee, was in power. The day was introduced as a more efficient alternative to individually celebrating a number of holidays honoring various minor saints in the Spring. It was not, however, Struensee who had come up with the idea of this particular reform, as the church commission which had worked on it had been instituted several years before Struensee arrived at the Danish court.
Bells in every church announce the eve of Store Bededag.
There are very few traditions associated with Store Bededag. Formerly, citizens and students of Copenhagen strolled the city ramparts on the evening before the holiday; the students of Copenhagen University did this to honour the many students who had died defending Copenhagen during the assault on Copenhagen. In the evening before the holiday, it was customary to buy and eat varme hveder, a traditional bread, because bakers were closed on holidays and people bought bread for the following day.
Today, the city ramparts are gone and instead the tradition is to walk along Langelinie on Copenhagen's waterfront or on the fortification of Kastellet, though only few follow this tradition depending on the spring weather. It is more common, also outside Copenhagen, to still buy and eat varme hveder.
This is the only day except Sundays on confirmations take place, for confirmation is part of regular church services.
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In Switzerland - except of in the Canton of Geneva - the Roman Catholic dioceses, the Old Catholic Church, the Jewish congregations and the Reformed (Calvinist) church bodies as well as other Christian denominations celebrate a comparable interfaith feast day named Federal Day of Thanksgiving, Repentance and Prayer (German: Eidgenössischer Dank-, Buss- und Bettag, or short Bettag, in French: Jeûne federal and in Italian: Digiuno Federale). It is celebrated on the third Sunday in September. In the Canton of Geneva another comparable feast, the Jeûne genevois, is celebrated.
In Germany the Protestant church bodies of Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and United denominational affiliation celebrate a comparable feast day named Day of Repentance and Prayer (German: Buß- und Bettag). It is now celebrated in November on the penultimate Wednesday before the beginning of the Protestant Liturgical year on the first Sunday of Advent. However, it is not a statutory non-working holiday anymore, except in the Free States of Saxony and of Bavaria, where it is a school holiday only.
The tradition of repentance and prayer is rooted in the Book of Jonah of the Bible, where God sent out the prophet Jonah (יוֹנָה) in order to announce the inhabitants of Nineveh, that God is to overthrow the city (Book of Jonah 3:4-10):
"And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not."
In mediaeval times Christians practised two kinds of days of repentance, those scheduled on particular events of emergency and those celebrated on the Ember days. After the Reformation the Protestant congregations continued that tradition. The first day of prayer, scheduled by Emperor Charles V, was celebrated in 1532 by Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire in Strasbourg on occasion of the Ottoman invasion at the eastern border of the Empire. In the following centuries different feast days of repentance and prayer were fixed within the many different Holy Roman German states of Protestant population.
In 1878 there were in some Provinces of Prussia and the component German states of the Empire (1871-1918) 47 different such feast days, celebrated at 24 different dates. In 1893 Prussia ended this plurality for the different territorially organised Protestant church bodies within its territory.[1] In all of Prussia the last Wednesday before November 23, or eleven days before the first Sunday of Advent, was fixed as Day of Repentance and Prayer, being also a statutory holiday. Later Protestant church bodies in other German states followed, and in 1934 it was fixed nationwide for the date now usual.
In 1939 the Buß- und Bettag was abolished as a statutory non-working holiday, in order to gain more working days during the Second World War, and thus it was celebrated on the Sunday following its actual date. After the war Buß- und Bettag was again celebrated on afore-mentioned Wednesdays, being again a statutory holiday in most states of Germany in all four sectors of Berlin and all four Occupation zones (except of the Free State of Bavaria in the American zone). In 1952 also prevailingly Catholic Bavaria made Buß- und Bettag a statutory non-working holiday - first only in its prevailingly Lutheran counties, as of 1981 in all the Free State. In 1966 Buß- und Bettag was abolished in the communist East German Democratic Republic and in East Berlin as statutory non-working holiday in the course of reducing the working week to five days.
After October 3, 1990, the day of unification of East Germany, East and West Berlin with the West German Federal Republic of Germany, Buß- und Bettag became a statutory non-working holiday in the East German states again. In 1994 the Federal Government of Germany passed a law organising the financing of the federal nursing care insurance. It needed more funds thus the federal government proposed to increase the working time of the German labour force for a day, without increasing the wages, but using the revenues of the unpaid additional labour day to secure the financing of the federal nursing care insurance. For this purpose the federal government, then led by Christian Democratic Union (CDU), proposed the German states, competent for the definition of religious feast days as statutory non-working holidays, to abolish the Protestant Buß- und Bettag as statutory non-working holiday.
All German states agreed, except of the Free State of Saxony, which chose instead a higher charge on labour revenues, so that only there Buß- und Bettag remained a statutory non-working holiday as of 1995. In Bavaria Buß- und Bettag remained a day off in all schools and most kindergartens.