plithos.org

Source for plithos.org - a free Orthodox Christian companion: the liturgical calendar, the daily saints and feasts, the fasting rule, traditional prayers, the writings of the Holy Fathers, and Holy Scripture, in twenty-two languages.

Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. There is no build step: what is in this repository is what is served.

Layout

index.html              Calendar, feasts, fasting rule, search
saints.html             Saints index, 1,456 saints
library.html            The Library: patristic works and the scripture reader
prayers.html            The prayer book, 100 prayers
rule.html               The fasting rule
glossary.html           Terms
contact.html            Contact
embed.html              The calendar panel, for embedding elsewhere

data/                   Datasets fetched for the one language a reader chose
scripture/              Old Testament by language and book, 21 languages
assets/                 The only shared CSS and JS on the site
functions/              Cloudflare Functions: per-language routes and /api/day
app/                    Capacitor wrapper that ships the site as an Android app

tools/                  Builders, checkers, and the translation source modules
docs/                   Editorial authority per language, and the defect list
CLAUDE.md               Architecture and the rules that bind anyone editing

tools/ and docs/ are not served; .assetsignore keeps them out of the upload. They are, however, the source of truth for everything under data/: the twenty-one language modules in tools/saint_lives/, tools/saint_info/, tools/saint_terms/ and tools/ui_i18n/ are what the published bundles are built from, and deleting them would leave the site unmaintainable.

Routes

Path	Serves
/ /calendar	index.html
/saints	saints.html
/library /reader	library.html
/prayers /rule /glossary	their own pages
/<lang>/...	the same pages, language pinned, via functions/
/api/day	the day's calendar as JSON

The translation, finished 11 September 2026

Every one of the four tracks is now complete in all twenty-one translated languages: the vocabulary a life is built from, the interface, the 1,456 saints' lives, and the 1,456 calendar entries that the day panel shows.

Languages	22 served, 21 of them translations of the English base
Translated items	274,963
Characters	58.8 million, roughly 9.8 million words
Saints	1,456, each with a long life and a sixty-word calendar entry

Greek, Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, German, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Italian, Serbian, Georgian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swahili, Armenian, Syriac, Hindi, Bengali and Urdu.

How it was done, and how long it took

Roughly three weeks, from the third week of August to 11 September 2026.

The work was run by several agent sessions writing in parallel against a shared branch. A small queue held the four tracks in dependency order - vocabulary first, because the grammar of a life is drawn from it, then the interface and the lives, and the calendar entries only once a language's lives were complete. Each worker asked the queue what was unwritten, took a claim so that two would not write the same saint, wrote a batch by hand, and pushed. A language large enough to be worth it was worked from both ends at once by two workers walking towards each other.

That machinery has been deleted. The queue, the claims file, the batch driver and the standing orders that drove them are gone, because a repository that still contains instructions to "take the next job" will eventually persuade something to start translating a language that is already finished. What remains of it is the part worth keeping: the editorial decisions, in docs/<LANGUAGE>.md, and the checkers in tools/.

Each language was settled before it was written. The register - whether a saint takes the bare word for holy or the rank his order gives him, how a place is spelled, how a sentence ends - was decided from what the site already published and written into that language's doc, so it was decided once. tools/check_register.py enforces the part of it a script can see.

What is verified, and what is not

The corpus is complete and structurally sound: every key present, every rendering in the right script, no placeholders, no English left standing, and the published bundles agree with their sources.

It is not verified for accuracy or for veracity. Nobody has read most of it in the language it is written in. The known faults, and an honest account of what a real review would cost, are in docs/BASELINE.md under the open defects of 11 September 2026. The largest of them are worth naming here: thirty Hindi lives quote Scripture in the site's house spelling rather than the edition's, a run of Arabic place names sits one key out of step, and thirty-two lives across Syriac, Portuguese and Italian are materially shorter than their source.

What comes next

Nothing below is started. It is the shape of the work as it stands today.

• Repair first. The open defects above, and the checkers themselves: check_translations.py reports some eleven thousand findings of which the great majority are locale artefacts - a full stop as a thousands separator in Portuguese and Romanian, ordinals as digits in Russian, Chinese counted short because Chinese is compact. A checker nobody trusts is why 7,622 finished calendar entries sat unpublished for days without anything going red. Fixing its rules is a day and is the highest-value day available.
• A published app. app/ holds a Capacitor wrapper that ships the site itself as an Android app. It has never been built, signed or submitted, and there is no iOS target.
• An Orthodox assistant. A companion that answers from this corpus rather than from the open internet, grounded in what the site publishes and refusing what it cannot ground. Intended in two forms: a general one, and an Orthodox one for laypeople, with the base level reachable from Plithos.
• The Library, expanded and translated. 97 works are catalogued, all of them in English. Two separate jobs: adding works the Church received and whose translations are public domain, and rendering what is already here into the other twenty-one languages. The second is larger than the entire saints' translation just completed, and should not be started until the review question above is answered.
• Scripture coverage. 21 languages carry an Old Testament. The canon rule in CLAUDE.md decides every edition question and is not negotiable: the edition carrying the books the Church reads wins.

Local preview

python3 -m http.server 8000    # then open http://localhost:8000

_headers, _redirects and functions/ are Cloudflare directives and do nothing locally, so extensionless routes such as /saints and the per-language routes only work in production.

For whoever comes next

Human or otherwise. CLAUDE.md is the canonical guide: the architecture, and the editorial, translation, source, cache, publication and validation rules. It is longer than this file and it is the one that binds. docs/<LANGUAGE>.md is the authority for a language and is read before a word of that language is written or changed.

There is no queue, and no work is waiting. The translation finished on 11 September 2026 and the machinery that ran it has been deleted. If you find an instruction anywhere in this repository telling you to take a slot, ask for a job, or work a language through to a total, it is a leftover and it is wrong: check what the site actually publishes before acting on it. What remains is repair and improvement, and it is listed in docs/BASELINE.md.

Four things bite immediately.

The HTML files embed their remaining datasets as single enormous lines. Do not open one whole; locate the assignment, slice it, parse it, work on the object and write the line back. NAMES_I18N in index.html will mislead you in particular: it opens as a small multi-line object and is then filled by about fifteen hundred separate assignments spread through the file, so reading only the opening gives you a table that looks complete and is not.

Most of /data is cached immutable for one year. Changing a file there without bumping the version in its filename will not reach returning visitors, and a new version needs a new rule in _headers as well as a new name. The exceptions are declared in _headers; read it rather than assuming either way.

Never invent, paraphrase, modernise or silently correct liturgical text, Scripture, or a saint's life, date, jurisdiction or relics. If something looks wrong, say so and leave it. That rule is the reason the site is worth publishing, and it is not negotiable for a deadline.

Do not escalate an editorial question about a language. The owner does not read most of the twenty-two and cannot adjudicate whether a Syriac rank word is right; asking stops the work and returns nothing. Settle it the way every finished language was settled - from what this site already publishes, counting the competing forms rather than choosing by ear - write the decision into docs/<LANGUAGE>.md so it is made once, and carry on. Deletion is the exception: ask about that.

Two house rules a script enforces and you should not fight: hyphens rather than dashes and straight rather than typographic quotes, in every language without exception; and nothing in tools/, docs/ or this file is served to a reader, so no served file may mention a script, a build or a pipeline.