Paul Schlyter wrote:

> one day ahead of the Julian calendar. The original idea was to skip
> all leap days from 1700 to 1740, in order to "gradually" switch from
> Julian to Gregorian calendar. So we skipped the leap day in 1700 and
> was one day ahead of the Julian calendar. However, the Swedish
> government wasy busy with various wars/etc, and forgot about this, so
> in 1704 and 1708 the leap days weren't skipped. In 1712 we were
> still one day ahead of the Julian calendar, so we decided to go back
> to the Julian calendar by adding TWO leap days to Febr 1712: thus, in
> Sweden in 1712, February had 30 days! From 1712 we remained on the
> Julian calendar until 1753, when we finally switched to the Gregorian
> calendar by skipping the last 11 days of February.

And I thought we had it bad, with a fractional timezone through the
centre of the continent, and each State using (or not) different dates
to begin & end their Summer Times...



cheers,
Fraser Farrell

http://www.dove.net.au/~fraserf/