Description of Challenge
Fostering evolving senses of collective identity in an ever-changing world.
Solution
Nowruz, literally meaning ‘a new day’ is an ancient celebration day and a ritual celebrated by many nations and communities in a wide geographical region from Central Asia to the Balkans. Nowruz is a joyful celebration for the arrival of spring as the new year in the northern hemisphere, accompanied by unique cultural colors, beliefs and ceremonies. It is celebrated on the day of the astronomical Northern equinox, which occurs on March 21.
Nowruz has deep and rich roots as a festival and ritual of celebrating the new year for the awakening of the nature and creation mainly in Iran, Central Asia and Anatolia.
The UN’s General Assembly in 2010 recognized the International Day of Nowruz, describing it as a spring festival of Persian origin which has been celebrated for over 3,000 years.
It is celebrated in different ways and in accordance with myriad local customs and traditions.
In Central Asia, Tartars, Uzbeks, Tajiks and others observe it differently today than they did – or could – in the times of the Soviet Union.
In Iran, Nowruz occurs at the heart of a month-long series of festivities that include a Halloween-like Festival of Fire on the last Tuesday night of the old year, and is capped with a day-long picnic on the thirteen day of the new year.
In Afghanistan, competitions such as kite-flying and Bozkashi are a regular feature of Nowruz festivities.
In Turkey, people wear colorful dress, dance, sing and jump over the fire
For much of the world, Spring has provided the supreme occasion for renewal and rejuvenation, for new resolves and new beginnings. The power behind its inexhaustible appeal to the human mind resides in a simple truth: humans need a ritual that transcends distinct and distinguishable groups, peoples and nations, to celebrate our common humanity.
Nowruz does so by inviting us to contemplate nature as it puts on its most magnificent dress at springtime, and to synchronize personal and communal relations with the spirit of nature.
By pointing out nature’s ability to renew itself each and every year, Nowruz has evolved, through the millennia, the manifestation of more pressing and more intense human yearnings.
The roots of Nowruz are scattered in myth and in history; they go deep into the earth beneath our feet, all the way to the time when the settlement of the first peoples in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, on the Iranian plateau and the steppes of Central Asia signaled a new phase in human civilization.
