Holidays in North Korea

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

About Time in North Korea

A Calendar That Began With One Man's Birth

For twenty-seven years, official North Korean documents, newspapers, banknotes and birth certificates did not simply record the Gregorian year alongside the date; they counted from an entirely different starting point. The Juche calendar, decreed on 8 July 1997, the third anniversary of founding leader Kim Il Sung's death, designated 1912, the year of his birth, as Juche 1. There was no Juche 0, and any date before 1912 continued to be written in the ordinary Gregorian style, but from the calendar's formal introduction on 9 September 1997, North Korea's own foundation day, every year from 1912 onward was expected to carry its Juche number in official use throughout the country.

The system quietly came to an end in October 2024, when North Korean newspapers began dropping the Juche year in favour of plain Gregorian dates, and by the printing of the country's 2025 wall calendars, the Juche numbering had disappeared from public circulation entirely. Outside observers have generally read the change as part of a broader shift by current leader Kim Jong Un to reduce the degree to which official life continues to revolve around his father and grandfather, even as the specific holidays built around their birthdays, the Day of the Sun for Kim Il Sung and the Day of the Shining Star for Kim Jong Il, have continued to be marked on the calendar exactly as before.

Thirty Minutes, Deliberately Out of Step

Shortly after midnight on 15 August 2015, factory whistles, train horns and ship sirens sounded across North Korea as the country's clocks were turned back by exactly thirty minutes, timed to coincide precisely with the seventieth anniversary of Korea's 1945 liberation from Japanese colonial rule. State television showed a ceremonial bell being rung in traditional Korean costume to mark the moment. The new standard, immediately named Pyongyang Time, set North Korea's official clock at 127 degrees 30 minutes east longitude, deliberately restoring the meridian Korea itself had used before Japan's 1910 to 1945 occupation, rather than the meridian imposed by Japanese colonial decree in 1912 and still used by both South Korea and Japan today.

North Korea's state news agency KCNA framed the move explicitly around erasing what it called the legacy of Japanese colonial rule, describing the earlier imposition of a shared time zone as one of many injustices inflicted during the occupation. The practical result was that, for the first time since Japan's colonial administration standardised Korean time in 1912, the two Koreas found themselves keeping different clocks despite sharing a single peninsula, a split that immediately raised logistical questions for the countries' one remaining joint economic project, the Kaesong Industrial Complex, where officials on both sides now had to account for a thirty-minute gap in coordinating shifts and paperwork across a border that, on paper, the two states had never stopped disputing.

A War That Has Not Technically Ended in Seventy Years

At 10am on 27 July 1953, representatives of the United Nations Command, North Korea and China signed the Korean Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom, halting active combat after three years of fighting that had begun with North Korea's invasion of the South on 25 June 1950. The agreement itself was the product of the longest negotiated armistice in recorded history, requiring 158 separate meetings spread across two years and seventeen days, complicated throughout by the need to translate every session into English, Korean and Chinese simultaneously.

What the armistice explicitly was not, however, was a peace treaty. Its own text described its purpose as ensuring a ceasefire only "until a final peaceful settlement is achieved," a settlement that, more than seventy years later, has still never been signed. South Korea's own president at the time, Syngman Rhee, refused to add his signature at all, objecting to the peninsula's continued division, though his government did agree to observe the ceasefire regardless. The armistice did produce one lasting physical legacy, the Demilitarized Zone, a heavily fortified buffer roughly two hundred and fifty kilometres long and four kilometres wide running along the original front line, which has now stood in place for longer than the shooting war it was built to pause ever lasted in the first place.

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