Gonder, Ethiopia · UTC+3 ☆

Gonder is in the East Africa Time timezone (EAT/UTC+3), year-round with no daylight saving.

Gonder is a historic city in northwestern Ethiopia, once the royal capital and home to a cluster of medieval castles. It runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, shared with Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and Kampala. No daylight saving.

But Gonder, like all of Ethiopia, also operates on the Ethiopian traditional clock. This system starts counting hours at dawn, roughly 6am by international reckoning, which becomes “12 o’clock” in the Ethiopian system. Ethiopian noon, when the sun is highest, is “6 o’clock” in the traditional count. Scheduling a meeting requires specifying which system you mean.

Royal capital, ecclesiastical city

Gonder served as Ethiopia’s capital from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Emperor Fasilides founded the city around 1636 and built the first of the Royal Enclosure’s castles. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintained an enormous presence here, with dozens of churches including the famous Debre Berhan Selassie, whose ceiling is painted with the faces of angels.

Church time in Ethiopia runs on the traditional solar clock. Liturgical schedules are set by the sun, not the civil time. Priests and monks navigate the two systems as a matter of routine.

Sharing a timezone with Addis Ababa

East Africa Time, UTC+3, is the only timezone in Ethiopia. When it is noon in Gonder, it is 9am in London and noon in Nairobi.

Convert 9am Gonder time to other cities.

Sources

• IANA Time Zone Database
• Ethiopian Central Statistical Agency
• Pankhurst, Richard. The Ethiopian Borderlands. Red Sea Press, 1997.