Mesir Macunu Festival

The Mesir Macunu Festival is held in Manisa during the week of Nevruz, from 21 to 24 March, regarded as the beginning of spring. It has continued in the city for about four hundred years.

The festival centres on mesir macunu, a paste regarded as a healing food. The account told in the city is that Hafsa Sultan, mother of Kanuni Sultan Süleyman, fell ill in Manisa with an illness nobody could name. Merkez Efendi, chief physician of the medrese at the Sultan Camii, made her a paste of forty-one plants and spices, and she recovered. She asked that it be given to the public every year in Nevruz week.

That giving-out remains the centre of the festival, and it is a scattering rather than a distribution. The paste is wrapped in small bright papers by at least fourteen women, in work said to require cleanliness, handiwork, experience and patience. It is then mixed and cooked with prayers and wishes for healing, and thrown from the minaret and domes of the Sultan Camii to the crowd below. Thousands come from across the country and compete to catch the packets in the air before they reach the ground.

The wider programme includes a traditional mesir procession, mixing and distribution ceremonies, a cooking competition, folk concerts, theatre, folk dancing and entertainment for children. The festival is held at the Sultan Camii and its külliye, where the knowledge and skills it depends on have been kept and passed on.

The festival was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012.

The festival is unusual in being organised around a substance rather than a performance. What is transmitted is the knowledge of how mesir macunu is made, and the occasion for making it. About 400 years of continuity in Manisa, attached to the Sultan Camii and its complex, is the kind of living practice a heritage listing exists to recognise.

The city describes the festival as supporting social peace and bringing people together. It also says care is taken to send mesir to visitors from abroad and to neighbouring provinces as an example of hospitality. That is a rare thing to find stated: an official account of a festival that treats the outsider’s presence as part of the point, rather than as a problem to manage.

The festival also sits within a larger spring boundary. Holding it in Nevruz week places it in the same turn of the year that this archive records elsewhere under other names, in other countries and on other calendars.