Holidays in Iceland

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Iceland

Ninety Minutes Ahead of the Sun

Reykjavik sits at roughly 22 degrees west of Greenwich, a longitude that by the ordinary logic of time zones should place the city close to UTC−1 or even UTC−2. Instead, the entire country keeps Greenwich Mean Time, UTC+0, all year round, with no seasonal clock change at all. The country actually ran on UTC−1 for decades before switching: on 5 April 1968 the Althing passed a law moving Iceland's legal time to UTC+0 effective two days later, reasoning that closer alignment with Western Europe would ease trade and telephone calls while the country's extreme seasonal daylight swings made the usual argument for daylight saving largely irrelevant, since in midsummer there is already far more light than anyone needs and in midwinter no clock adjustment can conjure light that is not there.

The consequence is a genuine mismatch between clock and sun. Solar noon in Reykjavik falls close to half past one in the afternoon rather than twelve, and in the depths of December the sun does not clear the horizon until nearly mid-morning by the clock. Since 1994, members of the Althing have periodically proposed reintroducing seasonal daylight saving to bring the clock closer to solar time in summer; every proposal so far has been rejected, and Iceland remains, alone among its Nordic neighbours, permanently on the meridian time of a city more than 1,600 kilometres to its east.

A Year With Only Two Seasons

Long before Iceland adopted the Gregorian calendar, its settlers kept a calendar unlike almost any other in medieval Europe: a week-based solar system, divided not into four seasons but two, summer and winter, each lasting exactly six months. Known as misseristal, it counted twelve months of thirty days each, added four extra days at midsummer to reach 364, and periodically inserted a full leap week, the sumarauki, to keep pace with the true solar year. Early Norse settlers elsewhere had tracked the moon, but Iceland's near-continuous summer daylight made lunar phases hard to observe reliably, so tenth-century Icelanders counted whole weeks instead, ensuring that every month always began on the same weekday.

The calendar itself faded from official use by the early nineteenth century, but one of its key dates never disappeared from daily life. Sumardagurinn fyrsti, the First Day of Summer, marking the start of the month of Harpa, is still a public holiday today, always falling on the first Thursday after 18 April. It was not formally written into law until 24 December 1971, despite having been celebrated informally for centuries beforehand, and Iceland remains, as far as records show, the only country in the world that marks the first day of summer as an official holiday, an odd distinction for a nation where April can still bring snow.

The Law Recited in Thirds

Iceland's parliament, the Althing, was founded in 930 at Þingvellir, a rift valley chosen because it offered enough water and grazing to support the crowds who travelled there, and it is generally reckoned the oldest surviving parliament in the world. For roughly two weeks every June, chieftains and their followers gathered at the site, living in temporary turf-walled booths, to settle disputes and pass law, a rhythm that continued, with interruptions during Danish and Norwegian rule, until the assembly's final session there in 1798.

Before Icelanders began writing their laws down in 1117, the entire legal code existed only in memory, entrusted to an elected official called the lögsögumaður, the Lawspeaker, who served a three-year term and was obliged to recite one third of the law aloud from the Law Rock at each annual gathering, so that a complete recitation of the code took his full term to complete. The written law that eventually replaced this system, known as Grágás, still carries the rhythmic, alliterative phrasing that had made the original oral version possible to memorise and recite correctly, year after year, on a fixed midsummer schedule, for nearly two centuries.

The Circle That Is Slowly Leaving

Only one scrap of Icelandic territory lies within the Arctic Circle: Grímsey, a small island roughly forty kilometres off the north coast, home to around a hundred people and vastly more seabirds. Because the circle passes directly through it, Grímsey is the sole place in the country where the sun genuinely never sets on the summer solstice, producing a full twenty-four hours of continuous daylight rather than the merely very long, twilight-dimmed nights experienced on the mainland.

The circle itself is not fixed. Because of long-term oscillation in the tilt of the Earth's axis, the Arctic Circle drifts northward by roughly fifteen metres every year, and islanders mark this by physically relocating a sculpture, a set of large concrete spheres known as Orbis et Globus, to the circle's new position each summer solstice. At the current rate of drift, astronomers expect the boundary to move north of Grímsey entirely by around 2050, after which no part of Iceland will lie within the Arctic Circle at all, quietly ending, without any ceremony or vote, a geographic distinction the island has held since long before anyone thought to measure it.

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