Abstract
Nevruz is a spring festival celebrated the world over and particularly in Eastern Muslim countries, including Iran and Turkey. It was for a long time commemorated by Ottoman society as a regular cultural festival, but the practice gradually changed since the late 1980s, when Kurdish nationalist movements arose. To put it briefly, the Nevruz festival, which was a normal cultural festival until then, was now transformed into a battlefield of ethnic self-assertion in Turkey. In this article I intend discussing the practical aspects of Nevruz in contemporary Turkey by utilizing primary sources like daily newspapers, by the observation of the Nevruz practices, and through interviews that I conducted during my field research
