Calendar of the Golden Empire

The Calendar of the Golden Empire was a method of dating and measuring time used in the Golden Empire. It was created by Rin Sakaros to address the fact that her empire, which existed entirely in the Unknown Regions, would have no concept of major events in the known galaxy upon which its calendar was based.

Rin followed the known galaxy's distribution of time on a 368-day year, itself based on Coruscant's natural time, as follows:
 * 60 seconds=1 minute
 * 60 minutes=1 hour
 * 24 hours=1 day
 * 5 days=1 week
 * 35 days / 7 weeks=1 month
 * 368 days=1 year
 * 10 months + 3 festival weeks + 3 holiday days=1 year

Rin created the holidays of the Sovereign's Birthday, Foundation Day, and Remembrance Day to account for the three holiday days. She chose to keep the three weeklong festivals of New Year's, Life, and Stars, as she believed all three were already valuable celebrations which needed no change. She did add the celebration of other cultures in the Empire to the Festival of Stars, and encouraged her citizens to travel to other worlds to learn about their fellow citizens (and all royally owned intersystem travel was discounted during this week).

However, Rin completely reoriented the calendar around a new point. Since her citizens would be unlikely to understand the significance of the Battle of Yavin, and since she had no desire to immediately explain it to them, Rin disposed of the known galaxy's BBY/ABY system. She replaced it with the designation "Year of the Golden Empire", abbreviated YGE, and began at the beginning of 87 ABY. Thus, the signing of the Charter of the Golden Empire took place during 1 YGE; there was no "zero year".

Rin did intentionally begin her calendar so its months and celebrations would align with those of the Galactic Standard Calendar, to more easily allow her Empire to absorb the known galaxy in the distant future. However, she began the measurement of her years with the New Year Festival; thus, Foundation Day was not the beginning of the Empire's year.