ترکیه

Volume III of this archive is Türkiye — Turkey, under the name its own institutions and the UN now use. It has only just started. What is published here is the beginning of a volume, not a survey of one, and what follows is orientation: how dates work here, what the record is built from, and what this volume does not intend to cover.

Two calendars run at once. Civil life is on the Gregorian calendar, so most dates in this volume are simply dates. Religious observance follows the Hijri lunar calendar, which moves against the Gregorian year by roughly eleven days annually — and here that is not the obstacle it is elsewhere. The state religious authority computes and publishes those dates well in advance; its official holiday tables already reach 2035.

That is worth stating plainly, because this archive treats the same calendar very differently in its Iranian volume. There, observance follows local sighting of the crescent, announced shortly before the fact, and every lunar date the archive publishes for Iran is marked estimated because it cannot honestly be anything else. The arithmetic is identical; what differs is whether an authority has committed to an answer.

For the festivals themselves, this volume starts from two places: the elements Türkiye has inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which is among the largest such sets any country holds, and the national culture portal run by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Both come with documentation a claim can rest on.

What this volume will not attempt, at least not soon: the very large regional repertoire that exists in practice without a published record, and anything dated by a calendar this archive’s engine cannot express. Absence here means not yet sourced. It does not mean unimportant.

On what is expected of a visitor, this profile says nothing yet. No national conduct guidance from an official body has been found, and the archive would rather record that as unknown than summarise something it has not read. Where an individual entry has sourced etiquette it carries it; where it does not, it says so.

This is not a survey of what is practised in Türkiye, and it is not close. It is a country the archive has committed to, with its first sources attached and its first entries beginning to appear.