Sunday marked the start of the Ramazan Bayrami (“Ramadan Holiday”), or Eid al-Fitr: a three-day celebration marking the end of Ramazan where Muslims the world over make up for a month of fasting and being nice by gorging themselves and being a little too festive.
Whether a Turk has fasted or not, a three-day national holiday is cause enough for celebration. Unless of course, the lunar calendar shifts the holiday forward that year and two of those three days come on a weekend in which case you curse the moon and go back to work.
After an Eid prayer at the mosque, the average Turk has a big breakfast, puts on their best clothes and gets in the family car for the customary traffic accident. Most people spend their Eid visiting relatives or going on vacation, both of which seem to require driving and ignorance of physics.
But Turkish Eid is more than just driving into other cars; when people do finally get to their relatives (the older the relative the better), children get a chance to wish them holiday greetings and the elderly get a chance to bribe their grandchildren with money or candy (hence why the holiday is also called “the Holiday of Sweets”).
In fact, children will visit neighbors, shopkeepers and anybody else that looks employed and offer their holiday greeting services in exchange for candy until the streets are filled with holiday cheer and tiny outstretched hands. Meanwhile, the adults are preparing big feasts for the family, giving to charity and shopping (even extremely un-Muslim IKEA released “A very Mubarak Eid” brochure). In a way, Eid is somewhere between the Muslim version of “Halloween,” the Muslim version of “Christmas,” and whatever Western holiday has a lot of car wrecks… possibly “Happy Hour.”
And if you are ever in
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