Holidays in Jordan

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

About Time in Jordan

A Kingdom That Gave Up on Changing the Clocks

Jordan has tried, and abandoned, daylight saving time three separate times since the practice was first introduced in 1973. The country ran on seasonal clock changes from 1973 to 1978, again from 1985 to 2012, and then once more from 2014 onward, each time springing forward for the warmer months and falling back for winter, much as most of Europe still does. A brief attempt to make summer time permanent during the winter of 2012 and 2013 was quickly reversed, with the government restoring the seasonal switch by December 2013.

The final break came on 5 October 2022, when Jordan's cabinet, acting alongside a near-simultaneous announcement from neighbouring Syria, decided to lock the clocks permanently onto what had been summer time, UTC+3, rather than falling back into winter standard time that October as scheduled. The government framed the change around maximising usable daylight and easing coordination with international partners, and adjusted school start times to accommodate darker winter mornings, having students begin around 8:15 to 8:30am rather than the earlier 7:30 start some had previously kept. The decision drew genuinely mixed reactions: some experts welcomed the reduced strain on the national electricity grid, while others, including one prominent meteorologist who pointed out that standard winter time was technically the country's "original" time zone based on its longitude, questioned whether the shift served ordinary Jordanians as well as it served daylight-hour statistics.

The Dam the Nabataeans Got Right the First Time

Petra sits inside a narrow sandstone gorge that funnels flash floods with lethal force whenever seasonal rains hit the surrounding highlands, a hazard the city's Nabataean builders understood well enough to engineer around more than two thousand years ago. Between roughly the fourth century BCE and the fourth century CE, they built an elaborate network of dams, terraces, covered channels, and rock-cut cisterns across the site, diverting floodwater away from the city centre through a purpose-built tunnel while simultaneously capturing and storing enough of it to support a desert population historians estimate at twenty to forty thousand people.

The system's effectiveness was proven, unintentionally, in the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, a flash flood swept through the Siq, the narrow entrance gorge to Petra, killing a group of French tourists who had nowhere to escape the surging water. In response, Jordan's government did not design a new solution from scratch; in 1964 it simply reopened and restored the ancient Nabataean diversion tunnel through the Wadi Al-Mudhlim, routing floodwater away from the Siq using essentially the same two-thousand-year-old engineering the original builders had relied on. The modern replica remains in active use today, a rare case of a nation's flood-control infrastructure being, quite literally, an inherited design rather than an updated one.

A City Built to Catch the Winter Sun

Beyond their mastery of water, the Nabataeans who carved Petra out of rose-coloured sandstone also built with the sky in mind. A statistical study of the orientation of Petra's major monuments, published by archaeoastronomer Juan Antonio Belmonte and colleagues, found that many of the city's most important structures were positioned to catch specific solar events at specific times of year, effects that would only have been visible for a handful of days each year and only from precisely the right vantage point.

The clearest example is Ad Deir, known as the Monastery, where the setting sun during the winter solstice sends a beam of light through the entrance to illuminate a raised ceremonial platform inside, a phenomenon researchers describe as spectacular but fleeting, visible only in the days immediately surrounding the solstice itself. At that same moment, viewed from the platform, the silhouette of the mountains opposite the monument resolves into the shape of a lion's head, the sacred animal of the goddess Al-Uzza. Elsewhere in the city, the Urn Tomb shows similar solstice and equinox alignments in its own orientation, a pattern researchers suggest may have influenced its selection, centuries after the Nabataean period ended, as the site where Bishop Jason formally consecrated it as Petra's Christian cathedral on 24 June 446 CE, one built structure absorbed into an entirely different religious calendar without ever losing its original relationship with the sun.

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