Happy Iranian New Year
It’s the Iranian New Year and we celebrated it with Iranian friends here in London.
The New Year celebrations go by many names, typically Nowruz meaning ‘new day’. The event is unrelated to Islam and indeed precedes it.
We marked the occasion at the London flat of Iranian brother and sister Mehrdad and Manoosh, whom we met on the flight to Tehran when we went on our holiday to Iran, together with their elderly parents Abbas and Mehri.
They followed the tradition of setting out on a little table seven items with names beginning with the Farsi letter ‘s’ – a practice known as Haft Sin. In accordance with tradition, the table also carried a copy of the Koran, a book of poetry by Hafez, a bowl with goldfish, and a photograph of their recently deceased sister.
We had traditional Iranian food for lunch and looked at the photographs of our trip, feeling privileged to share this special day with special friends.