It's the Year 1385 in Iran! (As of March 20, 2006 at 10:25:35 am California time!)

Iranians use the Jalali calendar, not the Gregorian calendar. The Persian New Year begins on the first day of Spring, at the actual moment of the vernal equinox. This is usually some time around March 20 each year. The first month is called Farvardin. Let's say that Farvardin the first falls on March 21st one year. The next month, Ordibehesht, will then start around April 22, and so on. You may notice that this will correspond roughly to the Zodiac calendar (see handy chart below).

Here are two excellent sites that will give you more details on the finer points of the Persian calendar:

Coming soon: Ajabanzaban's guide to telling time in Persian. (In the meantime, amuse yourself with these English Teaching Clock Games).

A table showing the general correspondence of Persian (Jalali) to English (Gregorian) to Zodiac calendars.

One day it will be nice to have a lovely wall calendar featuring the zodiac creatures and the corresponding Zoroastrian entities named in the Persian Calendar. Yes, these are Zoroastrian names and you can look them up in the Zoroastrian dictionary (although they are spelled differently in some cases). What do these entities look like? Bahman (good mind), Ordibehesht (fire), Shahrivar (fire and devotion), Esfand (holy devotion, earth), Khordad (perfection or health) and Mordad (immortality) are the "Beneficient Immortals", the highest arch-angels created by Ahura Mazda. Apparently the Zoroastrians aren't too big on iconography, though, so we don't have a huge clipart source to draw from.

A few more links to Calendar sites:

• Explanation of Iranian Calendar by Pars travel agency.
• Todays date, see the Payvand.com calendar.
• Other cultural calendars.
• Iranian calendars from Best Iran Travel.com