Beton Ski Team – Blog 13 – Newroz – spring celebration in tears

Newroz – it’s a festival of spring equinox, celebrating the return of the season of light and also the most important Kurdish festival, which has become one of the symbols of the fight of the Kurds of independence.

Women in colourful clothes, men in traditional beige suits or with a scarf or a red-yellow-green head-string. The park under the Van castle is busy. You can buy various kind of food. The eyes in dark faces of the people are sparkling. This day is simply special.

We can hear music from the stage and we would like to get closer to it. However, we get stopped often. People want to welcome us here, say hi, take a picture with us. Probably, there not many foreigners at Newroz in Van this year. We don’t get to the stage at all since we cannot refuse the invitation to eat delicious Dolma (vine leaves stuffed with rice, meat, and herbs) in one of the local stands. We are just in the middle of a very interesting chat with a teacher from the Van University when people start to shout, cover their mouths and eyes and run to the centre of the park. Some of them carry their kids hidden under their coats.

It´s tear gas.

A few people stoically say, that they are used to such things since it happens every year. The moderator asks the police not to attack the celebrating Kurds, since they only want to have some fun. After a while the music starts playing again… It’s an attempt to save this special day. In the meantime the police blocks one of the two entrances to the park. After a while they fires tear gas again. The fun is definitely over. The moderator only calls the ambulance and starts reading the list of kids which got lost in this mess. The only opened entrance becomes quickly completely jammed.

We got into conversation with a group of students with a group of students selling traditional sweets to raise money for refugees from Kurdish city Kobani which has been attacked by the ISIS.

We are leaving the park and are aiming to the castle which lies nearby. On its walls, there is a number of policemen; both with or without uniforms, there are also some soldiers with Kalashnikovs. Their helmets with plexi-glas are leaned on the flagpole with huge Turkish flag. They are definitely not glad to see red-yellow-green headstrings on our heads, which we got as a gift from the students. “They are all terrorists, they kill our brothers…” we hear the policemen saying.

We return back to the car silent. We definitely don’t want to judge such complicated such complex issues as the Turkish-Kurdish one. Especially when we know so little about it. However, the strong feeling remains.

However, Turkey keeps surprising us. The next day we should have the opportunity to see the Turkish military forces from a completely different angle – as guests of the chief commander of a base in the mountains near Hakkari close to the Iranian and Turkish borders.

#SkiToCloud

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Thanks to Murat Adiyaman from Hakkari for sharing his pictures from Newroz celebration in Diyarbakir.