Monday, April 9, 2007

Easter in my childhood!

When I was a child, there were vendors on the streets of my town selling boiled eggs at this time of the year. These eggs were boiled in onion water; therefore, they had a reddish color. They did not sell any other times but only in early April. We would by these eggs and compete with friends as to whose egg would smash first by hitting the tops of the eggs. At that time I did not think of the meaning of such events. Now, however, it makes a lot of sense to me when I think about it. It was the time of Easter. Even though people did not celebrate as Easter, the remnant of celebration has stayed in the minds of these non-Christian people after being Islamized. Was this kind of celebration from the Christians who were forced to leave their homeland less than a century ago? In this case I talking about the Armenians with whom we, the Kurds, shared a land. Or something was left to us from the Christian Assyrians or Kaldeans or Arameans? Who knows? These cultural events need to be explored or researched—hopefully in the future when the Kurds are free to look into the roots of these celebrations and traditions that we unknowingly celebrate. To note here is that such events recently have died out like the dinosaurs once roamed on the surface of the planet. Unfortunately, there is any effort to revive such things that once shaped our lives and were a part of us. Once again I hope that these tradition kept alive or are revived when we gain our cultural freedoms in the lands where the cultural rights of ethnic groups are denied or oppressed brutally.

1 comment:

Behram Xalid said...

siz kendinizi ne saniyorsunuz.