Kandy Esala Perahera Dates and Sri Lanka Perahera Calendar
Pick a year and get every major perahera date, the Kandy Esala Perahera night by night with the official start times. Rows say whether the date is a published schedule or a Poya-anchored estimate, so you know what you can book against.
How it works
Perahera dates are lunar, not calendar. Each festival ends on a Poya full moon, so its Gregorian dates slide by about eleven days a year. That is why a travel blog with last year's dates still on it is worse than useless, and why this page takes the year as an input.
The tool gives two kinds of answer and never blurs them together.
- A published schedule is a lookup, not a calculation. Where the organiser has released its own table, those rows are stored verbatim, times included, with the page they came from and the date a human read it. The 2026 Kandy Esala Perahera is transcribed row for row from the Sri Dalada Maligawa schedule, and the 2025 one from the same page as archived in May 2025. Nothing is rounded, smoothed or inferred.
- Poya anchors come from one engine. Full moons are computed with the Meeus lunar-phase algorithm already implemented for the Poya calculator. This module imports it rather than carrying a second copy of the lunar terms.
- The anchor is the sil day, not the full-moon instant. The two differ by a day about half the time, because the full moon often falls after local midnight. The Maligawa's own Poya calendar shows it: the 2026 Nikini tithi opens on 27 August and closes on 28 August, and the observed sil day is the 27th. So the tool anchors to the gazetted Poya from the holidays calendar where one is published, matching it to the computed moon by proximity within 2 days rather than by name. Name matching is unsafe: May 2026 held two full moons and the published lists disagree about which one is Vesak.
- Expected windows name their anchor.Where no schedule exists, the tool shifts back from the anchor by the festival's known offset and widens the result by 1 day on each side. For Kandy that offset is 9 nights, and it is observed rather than assumed: both published schedules put the first Kumbal Perahera exactly 9nights before the Poya. Because the Maligawa's festivals page says the perahera falls on “Esala or Nikini”, an unannounced year gets a window covering both moons instead of one guessed date.
- Status is stored, never inferred.A row reads Official schedule only when someone has read the organiser's published table and stamped the record. Everything else reads Expected, with the Poya named, or says the organiser announces it.
The published schedules and the lunar engine share nothing, so one can check the other. Running that reconciliation on every schedule in the dataset: the 2026 Final Randoli lands exactly on the gazetted Nikini Poya, an offset of 0 days, and its predicted first night of 18 Aug 2026 matches the published one. The 2027 Navam Perahera, announced by Gangaramaya months after this rule was written, also lands on its gazetted Poya with an offset of 0 days. Measured against the astronomical full moon alone, both would be a day out, which is the clearest evidence that the sil day is the right anchor.
Worked examples
Which Poya each festival follows
| Festival | Where | Ends on | Typical run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duruthu Maha Perahera | Kelaniya, Gampaha | Duruthu Poya | A short run of peraheras over consecutive nights, culminating on Duruthu Poya. |
| Navam Maha Perahera | Colombo, Colombo | Navam Poya | Two nights: the eve of Navam Poya and the Poya night itself. |
| Kandy Esala Perahera | Kandy, Kandy | Esala or Nikini Poya | Ten nights, five Kumbal then five Randoli, ending on the Poya. The Diya Kapeema and the Dahawal Perahera follow the next day. |
| Bellanwila Esala Perahera | Boralesgamuwa, Colombo | Esala or Nikini Poya | A short run of nights closing on the Esala or Nikini Poya. |
| Kataragama Esala Festival | Kataragama, Monaragala | Esala or Nikini Poya | A fortnight of nightly peraheras, closing with the water cutting at the Menik Ganga on the Poya morning. |
| Nallur Kandaswamy Kovil Festival | Nallur, Jaffna | Set by the kovil | Twenty-five days from a flag hoisting the kovil fixes by its own astrological reckoning. |
Poya anchors are from each organiser's own description of its festival. Use the tool above for the dates: it resolves these anchors against the gazetted Poya for the year you pick.
Frequently asked questions
Sources & references
- Sri Dalada Maligawa: the Kandy Esala Perahera scheduled dates
- Sri Dalada Maligawa: the 2025 Kandy Esala Perahera schedule (archived 14 May 2025)
- Sri Dalada Maligawa: Four Main Festivals of the Temple of Tooth Relic
- Sri Dalada Maligawa: Poya day calendar, tithi onset and sil day
- Gangaramaya Temple: Nawam Maha Perahera
- Ministry of Public Administration: the annual Holidays Gazette under the Holidays Act No. 29 of 1971
- perahera.live: the official Kandy Esala Perahera live stream
Full-moon dates are computed with the Meeus lunar-phase algorithm from Astronomical Algorithms(2nd ed., Ch. 49), imported from this site's Poya calculator rather than reimplemented. Gazetted Poya dates come from this site's public holidays calendar, transcribed from the annual Holidays Gazette. Planning a Sri Pada climb in the same trip? The Adam's Peak season planner works out the season and the summit sunrise. Schedules and anchors were last checked against the organisers on 15 October 2026.
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Comments & feedback
Spotted a bug or want an improvement? Tell us, our team reviews every comment, and good ideas get built. Comments are public and anonymous.
Spotted a schedule that has been published, or a date that looks wrong?
Email me at [email protected] with the organiser's link and I will transcribe it.