Chaharshanbe Suri is older than Islam in Iran. It goes back to Zoroastrianism, to a time in which fire was not worshipped but regarded as a sign of purity, light and truth. The festival always takes place on the evening before the last Wednesday, that is from March 17 to March 18, of the Persian year, shortly before Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which this year falls on March 20. The idea behind it is as old as it is simple: What was heavy, what was sick, what burdened the past year, should not be taken into the new one. It is left with the fire.
The sentence many say when jumping reads in meaning: My paleness belongs to you, your redness belongs to me. Illness and weakness go to the fire, strength and life come back. This is not a prayer, not a formula, not a religious act in the institutional sense. It is something people simply do because their parents did it and their parents as well, through bans, through systems, through centuries.
In the past this was a quiet ritual. Small fires in the alleys, neighbors, food, visits, a warmth that meant more than temperature. That has changed. Today Chaharshanbe Suri in Tehran is loud, sometimes chaotic, a mixture of street festival and uncontrolled New Year’s Eve, with fireworks that echo in narrow alleys and throw sparks that no one counts anymore. The original silence is gone, but something of the original meaning has remained, deep inside, beneath the noise.
The regime never liked the festival. It is not a state organized event, it comes from below, from society itself, and that alone makes it suspicious. There were restrictions, bans, attempts at control, in tense years more than in calm ones. In tense years people still go out, or perhaps precisely because of that. The festival was never only a festival. It was always also a moment in which the street belongs to the people, not to the state.
And now this moment is in a year that is not calm.
Tehran, the civilian population, stands under pressure that cannot be fully described, because language struggles with things that happen at the same time and actually should not be happening at the same time. Missiles strike. Somewhere in the city, somewhere not far, one hears it. And on the street people jump over fire and say the old sentence, my paleness belongs to you, your redness belongs to me, and mean it as seriously as always, perhaps more seriously than ever before. The contrast is so harsh that it almost seems unreal, and yet it is real, and yet both are true at the same time: the impact and the fire, the fear and the jump, the war and the desire to go into the new year with a little less heaviness.
Chaharshanbe Suri has endured through everything. Through the fall of governments, through the change of systems, through decades in which it was not supposed to take place officially and unofficially still took place. It belongs to the things in Iran that simply remain, not because someone fights for them, but because they are in the people themselves and cannot be swept out. No ban, no regime reaches what has been written into souls over generations.
What it means in this year, the courage to jump over a fire and to say take my weakness and give me your light, that can only be known by someone who stands there. But that it happens, in the middle of everything, is perhaps the actual message.
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