Melek Erdal’s Spring Eggs for Newroz
Plus an essay on eating, feeling, and becoming spring. Text, photographs, and videos by Melek Erdal. Additional video contributed by Berfin and Cousin Perrie.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Melek Erdal. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Newroz means New Day
Newroz means new day. It is our holy day celebrated after the triumph of our tortured people over tyranny and exploitation, with the help of Kawa, the ironmonger. It is the oldest celebration of independence in the history of mankind. It is a new day, because winter ends and spring starts, the sun leaves Pisces and enters Aries. The new day because nature renews the year and herself. So, when the sun takes to 21 March, we leave our homes to embrace Mother Nature.
— A village elder’s opening monologue in Ümit Elçi’s Mem û Zîn (1992)
Coming from the Persian word ‘Nowruz’ – ‘now’ meaning ‘new’ and ‘ruz’ meaning ‘day’ – Kurds have celebrated Newroz as our collective New Day for centuries. Newroz, or spring equinox, is the most significant festival in both the Kurdish and Iranian calendar, ushering in the ‘new day’ that marks the start of ‘Bihar’, or spring. It has, in the past decades, taken on a more potent, politically symbolic meaning in the pursuit of freedom from oppression, and the expression of identity.
In the opening scene of Ümit Elçi’s 1992 film adaptation of Mem û Zîn – a fourteenth-century Kurdish love story – we see a Newroz eve procession, in which villagers carry beacons of fire up a mountain at night. These beacons signal the triumph of light over dark, resistance over tyranny, love over all else. The mountains will turn green with abundant pastures and fresh herbs, and ‘young hearts will see and choose their matches’. In the new day, the daylight will literally outlast the night.
In Mem û Zîn, as the procession of fire leads to the top of the mountain, a village elder tells the legend of the origins of Newroz to a gathering sat around him. He is played by Musa Anter, or ‘Apê’ (Uncle) Musa as he was more affectionately known – a leading Kurdish writer, journalist, and intellectual who was assassinated by JITEM, the intelligence branch of the Turkish military police, the same year the film was released.
In 1991, the year Mem û Zîn was made, the Kurdish language was still illegal in Turkey, and so it was shot entirely in Turkish, and dubbed into Kurdish later. In this year, Newroz was forbidden too. Our spring was forbidden until the Turkish minister of culture changed its name to ‘Nevruz’ – the letter ‘w’, you see, is in the Kurdish alphabet but not in the Turkish one – and rebranded it as a central Asian festival.
So, we were allowed spring, but not with a ‘w’.
I know that my grandfather died in spring, even though I was too small to remember the date or details. I remember this because, to comfort me, my aunt Hatice pulled fresh herbs from the earth, washed them in the fountain from which the sheep drank, and tucked them generously into some lavash. She sprinkled salt over the greens, wrapped them tightly, then dipped the lavash in yogurt and fed me. I consumed the spring and was soothed from the sadness of my Aziz dede’s passing.
Today, I think about how, when we eat with the seasons, we become those seasons. In eating fresh herbs, we are eating spring, consuming its light, absorbing its hope. And if we are to be spring now, then we are light and love and hope. I think about how gracefully everything intersects, and how everything’s survival relies on these intersections. I think about Apê Musa’s description of Newroz as resistance against tyranny, a celebration of the seasons, and a time for finding our heart’s match, all in the same sweeping breath.
The story of Mem and Zîn initially survived centuries through the oral tradition of the ‘dengbêj’, or ‘storyteller’, passing from storyteller to storyteller, bard to bard. Then, the seventeenth-century Kurdish poet Ehmedê Xanî turned it into an epic poem, taking the risk of committing the story to ink and paper in Kurmanji instead of Persian or Arabic. The story had to be beautiful, to survive for hundreds of years before it was written down. Xanî risked his life to write the text in its own tongue. Apê Musa then lost his life to preserve the same Kurdish.
This is the chain of devotion and love, resistance and determination, politics and art, threading together centuries and seasons, then and now. I think about the countless Kurds who risk their lives to celebrate Newroz, every year, across multitudes of oppressed regions where it is still a contended festival, so that we may know about all that spring brings. I think of the food that has survived in the same way, also made beautiful and celebrated, before it is passed down.
And so, here are my green eggs for springtime. Eggs that the Persians use on Chaharshanbeh Suri, their Newroz eve, to represent birth and fertility on their Haft sin table. Greens, all the greens, for this season. Chilli butter for the Kurds, because we know so well how to embrace ‘acı’ (the word used for both ‘spicy’ and ‘pain’).
And yogurt, for my grandfather, who lives in every spring.
Spring greens, herbs, and eggs with garlic yogurt and chilli butter
Serves 2
Time 35 mins