Why do the days of the week have «fair» in the name?

“Fair” comes from feria, which, in Latin, means “day of rest”. The term began to be used in the year 563, after a council of the Catholic Church in the Portuguese city of Braga – hence the explanation for the presence of the term only in the Portuguese language. On that occasion, Bishop Martinho de Braga decided that the names of the days of the week used until then, in honor of pagan gods, should change. But wait a minute: if feria is a rest day, why is “fair” only used on weekdays?

This happens because, in the beginning, the bishop’s order was valid only for the days of Holy Week (the one before Easter Sunday), in which every good Christian should rest. Then it ended up being adopted for the whole year, but only by the Portuguese – in Spanish, French and Italian, the gods continue to knock the clock day after day. The only exceptions assumed by our mustachioed brothers – and later incorporated into the Portuguese colonies – were Saturday and Sunday (Prima Feria, in Holy Week), which derive, respectively, from the Hebrew shabbat, the day of rest of the Jews, and from the Latin Dies Dominicus , the «Day of the Lord».

Since 321 Western calendars have started the week on Sunday. The rule was imposed that year by the Roman emperor, Constantine, who, moreover, definitively established that the weeks would have seven days. The order was not random: although at the time the Romans adopted weeks of eight days, the Bible already said that God had created the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh and, as it seems, the Babylonians also already divided the year into sets of seven days.

It’s fair day