Newroz

This is a distinctive process associated with natural regions whose geographical and strategic settings give them particular natural conditions and the earth’s essential formative elements, namely water, sunlight, soil, and wind. With the coming and going of these deities, a sacred occasion was observed each time. Newroz is one of these occasions, with a history deeper than the stories commonly circulated and presented about it.

Because the genuine and ancient character of this observance has been lost, and because of nationalism, racism, and, more importantly, the chauvinism and fascism of dominant peoples, several sources remote from scholarship circulate a history of Newroz that has caused tension among the cultures of the ancient Iranian peoples.

If the word Newroz is examined morphologically, it is formed at the lexical level from new + roz, meaning a day that becomes new. But how does a day become new? When tonight ends, is the following morning not already another, new day?

The true philosophers, namely children who are free from every form of subjugation, ask this important question: whenever night departs and light appears, is it not a new day? Why, then, does it become a new day on this occasion after 365 days?

Here, roz is an idiom and a metaphorical concept for the sun. In Kurdish, the word roz is also used for xor, “sun”; the intended meaning is the renewal of the sun.

The word new appears across the world’s living languages and their major language families in the following forms:

Afrikaans Nuwe, Armenian նոր, Bengali Nowtun, Bosnian Novo, Catalan Nuo, Croatian Novi, Slovak Nový, Danish Ny, Irish Nieuw, English New, French Nouveau, German Neu, Greek Νεος, Scots Nýtt, Lithuanian Nauja, Hindi नया, Esperanto Nova, Galician Novidade, Italian Nuovo, Portuguese Novo, Norwegian Ny, Polish Nowy, Russian новый, Romanian Nou, Spanish Nuevo, Welsh Newydd, Swedish Ny, Pashto نوی, Urdu نئی, Persian نوُ, and Kurdish نوێ.

In Hawrami, the word roz becomes roj through the change of the phoneme /ژ/ to /ج/, while in Persian it becomes /ز/. Persian transformed Kurdish ڕۆژ into روز through changes involving the phonemes /و/ and /ز/; in Kurdish it is pronounced ڕۆژ، ڕۆز، ڕوج. The word was shared among the ancient Iranian languages: Avestan رئوچنگە; Scythian and Old Persian رئوج; Pahlavi رۆج, rōc; and Balochi روج. It derives from shared Iranian forms represented by Pahlavi rōšn, rōšnāk, rōšnak, and rōčāk, carrying the meaning “bright, luminous”: brightness appears and light prevails.

Sabir Zhakaw