Novruz: Yaz Gəlir!

(my convo club and a dinner party with my counterpart Hediyye, whose name literally translates to "gift", and a bonfire, explained below)

So, spring approaches here in Azerbaijan, and that means one thing to the people here: Novruz! Novruz, originally meaning"new year" in some super-old language, is originally a Zoroastrian celebration of new life in spring. For those of you who neither know who Zoroaster (aka Zarathustra) is or can't even pronounce his name, it will simply suffice to know that he was the prophet of the first monotheistic religion (predating Judaism, Christianity, etc) and a key developer in theistic morality based on a battle between good and evil. However, none of this is really important, because he has been dead for a few thousand years and the extent of his influence in the cultures of Persia and Azerbaijan has been largely glossed over by the influence of Islam. What is important is that because of him, we now have Novruz, so I get two weeks off of work, a ton of free food and a glimpse at a bunch of traditions and customs that are both intruiging and wildly confusing.

The actual holiday of Novruz is on March 21st, the first day of spring. However, the four Tuesdays preceding it are celebrated in relation to the four elements: water, wind, earth and fire. The first Tuesday involves sprouting wheat in a dish, around which a red ribbon is tied to symbolize the new life of spring. The second and third Tuesdays are a bit confusing to me, as I'm not really sure what it is they did to celebrate it, but they did feed me dolma so it made me happy anyways. The final Tuesday was this week, the day of fire, and to celebrate it we went over to one of my counterparts houses, ate, then built a bonfire and jumped over it. In my experience, jumping over bonfires has always been the preferred activity of bored boy scouts or drunk fratboys, but here it's part of a tradition that's so old it's hard to fathom, and has something to do with new life or granting wishes or genies or something; quite frankly, between the sleep inducing huge meal I had eaten and my relatively poor grasp on the local language, I didn't really understand why I was jumping over said fire, but I went with it and did it anways.

On the 21st there are bound to be more fires to jump over, kids running around to houses knocking on doors asking for baklava, candy and baked goods (ala Halloween), coloring of eggs (ala Easter), and eating a crapton of food (ala Thanksgiving). Also included are a variety of fortunetelling rituals involving dropping wax in water, banging a ring on a string against the inside of a glass, and eavesdropping on your neighbors. Incidentally, according to these rituals I will be married at age 42 to someone whose name starts with "X". This was met with great dispair by the family I was guesting with, who would have preferred I get married at 23 to their daughter. Alas, my bride-not-to-be will probably be better suited to a man who can understand more than half of what she says and has a job he actually gets paid for.

Anyways, the guy at the internet club is telling me to get up so that some kid can sit here and play video games for three hours. I'm gonna go home and build a fire.

-K