Shab-e Yaldā: Advent #12
To the poet, John Clare, the first star that rises after sunset acts as a celestial shepherd’s lamp; a profoundly comforting image of starlight acting as a guide for our ancestors as they navigated dark country lanes or city alleys, sailed towards the midnight blue line that divides ocean and horizon or watched over sheep in fields. “The Shepherd’s Lamp, which even children know,” he wrote. That star is Vesper, (which we now know to be Venus) and so bright is its light, it is capable of casting shadows.
At 3:59 pm today the Northern Hemisphere is at its maximum tilt away from the sun, a small moment in time and a still point as the sun’s path across the sky seems to freeze at its lowest point to give us the winter solstice— the longest night of the year. Our shadows will be at their longest too. At sunset, I will go outside and look for Venus.
Winter solstice marks the official beginning of astronomical winter which sounds far more romantic than ‘meteorological winter’ which starts a few weeks earlier. The Norsemen of Northern Europe believed the sun to be a wheel that changed the seasons. Winter Solstice saw the Norsemen lighting bonfires, over which they sang and drank and told stories. In Britain, Yule was celebrated long before the arrival of Christianity, and its name is said to derive from the Old English word “gēol,” which may come from Old Norse.
Shab-e Yalda ("Yalda night" Persian: شب یلدا) is an Iranian festival celebrated on the night of the Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice. Friends and family gather together to eat and drink and read poetry. The festival honours the birth of Mithra, the ancient Persian goddess of light and reaches back to a time when Zoroastrianism was the main religion in Iran. “As the light spilled through the sky in the moment of dawn, Persians celebrated its appearance with drumming and dancing. It was thought that the day after the longest night belonged to Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian lord of wisdom,” Dr Pardis Mahdavi, the anthropologist, wrote.
The food writer Yasmin Khan retweeted the thread below which explains the celebrations beautifully. Her book, Saffron Tales, has a few recipes using pomegranates and describes a lovely encounter with Faranak Evaghi, a design teacher at a local art college in Isfahan. “We learn about the beauty of the pomegranate from an early age in Iran,” Evaghi tells her. “Some people even call their children Anargol, a term of endearment that means you are as beautiful as the flowers of the pomegranate.”
Red is a felicitous colour and a thread that runs through many Shab-e Yalda decorations. There are platters of red apples, watermelon slices and berries. Ruptured pomegranates spill glossy seeds which symbolise life and vivacity and the coming dawn in the face of winter, tiny pears and apples are fashioned from coloured marzipan, and nuts and seeds are arranged in the shape of a crescent moon. The watermelon is so central to Yalda, gateaux, ice cream bombes, and jellies are made in its image in the hope that their eating will protect the consumer’s health. The festivities are a triumph of hope and light over darkness.
Thought to be one of the world’s first domesticated crops, the pomegranate often crops up in the writings and social media of Caroline Eden, whose books explore the food and culture of Central Asia and the Caucasus. In ‘Red Sands’ she writes of the “sweet, messy ceremony” that unfolded wherever the fruits were bought and consumed, cocktails made with its juice to “cool the tail-end of a springtime fever”, of the Savitsky Museum in Nukus where Mikhail Kurzin’s painting of shashlik and a “leathery pomegranate ready to spill its wet seeds” is hung and a bazaar in Siyob where “piles of shiny maroon pomegranates- the juice of which Tamerlane’s armies allegedly drank before going into battle” are on sale. Eden remarks on the “enormous meaning of colour. Colour and light.”
Further reading:
Persians are wonderful memoirists and storytellers. Ariana Bundy’s Pomegranates and Roses: My Persian Family Recipes is a glorious book filled with memories, anecdotes and cultural context. For a special treat, Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets by Najmieh Batmanglij is comprehensive and the realisation of an author’s dream to revisit Iran and celebrate the specialities and traditional dishes of each region.
I have just bought a new adaption of Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings, translated by Ahmad Sadri described as ‘part myth, part history’ about the birth of the Persian nation and a way of preserving cultural memory “amidst a turbulent sea of cultural storms.”
Naz Deravian on a joyful reminder of lighter days ahead and pomegranates for the NYT (£)
Louisa Shafia for Food52 on red fruit and fortune-telling: “The idea that there is one extra minute in this night and that we should spend it with the people we love is so romantic.”
Yeganeh Rezaian for Roads and Kingdoms: “Ancient Zoroastrians in Iran used red to represent the color of dawn and light in general. For that reason, many of the edibles served on Yalda are red. Iranians everywhere serve a variety of fruits, including pomegranate—the crown jewel of fruits native to Iran—watermelon and persimmon.”
thanks for this. Learned a lot about significance of pomegranate. I also know a few people named "Anar" "Anarkoli".