Cian McKeown, Staff Writer; and Alex Cambouris, Staff Writer
On Friday, March 22, 2024, members of the Persian community at Beloit hosted a gathering to celebrate the spring equinox Nowruz festival, a tradition that stretches back 3,000 years. While rooted in Iran, it is celebrated across the Middle East and Central Asia. Nowruz can be celebrated both religiously and secularly, originating as a Zoroastrian religious holiday.
Festivities occur over thirteen days and begin with Charshanbe Suri, the prelude to the New Year, which often involves rituals like leaping over bonfires and lighting off fireworks. Spoon banging also takes place during this time, similar to the western custom of trick or treating, it involves children going door to door in disguises, banging spoons and asking neighbors for packaged snacks. On the thirteenth and final day of Nowruz, those in observers in Iran enjoy a day outdoors as part of the Sizdah Bedar tradition. Nowruz has also gained wider official recognition, with many other countries in central Asia officially recognizing the holiday after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.
The event that Beloit students held in the Science Center Atrium included music, traditional foods, and snacks like chai tea and Lavashak, a Persian fruit leather. “When you pour some pomegranate molasses on top of it and roll it up, it tastes better than a fruit roll up,” says Beloit first year student Henry Amini’27, in charge of the snack table. Participants also engaged in egg decorating, another Nowruz tradition, where they painted different patterns on plastic eggs and hung them from a tree displayed on the ground floor of Beloit College’s Science Center.
A proper Nowruz celebration at Beloit has been a long time coming, said Hasti Hairy’24, Beloit senior and event organizer. “We discussed freshman year that it would be really cool having an event like this on campus, then this year I was thinking about how it’s kind of sad that other communities on campus get to have events like this and our Nowruz is never really represented in the emails that administrators send out. So we thought it would be really nice to introduce this to the community, because there’s a lot of us [Persian students] here and there’s a lot of non-Persian students that celebrate Nowruz as well.”
Hairy and other Persian students on campus had been in preparation for the event for the previous two months. Hairy also mentioned the reasoning behind holding this celebration: “One of the big reasons that I did this is because there are a lot of people who celebrate this on campus and it would be a good opportunity to get the word out about Nowruz and celebrate it ourselves, because a lot of us can’t celebrate with our families, but we can celebrate with our community.”
Posters displayed at the event also made a point to emphasize the ongoing struggle for the rights of women in the Arab world, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan with mass demonstrations by women in Afghanistan in 2022 to protest the Taliban’s strict modesty laws, resulting in the execution of hundreds of demonstrators. Said Hairy, “It was also a perfect opportunity for us to talk about activism in Iran and Afghanistan because that’s where the majority of Persians live and we think it would be fair to do this event, which is usually organized by women and we don’t talk about women’s suffering in Iran and Afghanistan.”
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