Hıdrellez

Hıdrellez is a spring celebration held on 6 May, marked as Spring Day and the awakening of nature. Its name joins Hıdır and İlyas, held to protect earth and water, and the day is when they are said to meet.

The practice is tied to nature rather than to a building. Ceremonies and rituals are performed for the wellbeing, fertility and prosperity of a family and its community, and for the protection of livestock and crops in the coming year. The heritage record places Hıdrellez across oral traditions, performing arts, social rituals and festivities, and knowledge concerning nature.

In Türkiye, Hıdrellez is also known as Hızır-İlyas, Ederlezi, Kakava, Haftamal, Eğrilce and Eğrice. These names point to a celebration kept in more than one way.

One limit of this record matters. Hıdrellez was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List in 2017 at 12.COM, nominated jointly by Türkiye and North Macedonia, but the inscription does not separate what is done in one country from what is done in the other. The Turkish record adds the names above, but likewise does not set out what differs in practice. Where you go will shape what you actually see, and this entry does not yet say how.

Hıdrellez marks a boundary in the working year rather than in a religious calendar: the point at which the season is held to turn, nature awakens, and people ask that the year’s animals and crops come through. Its concerns are agricultural and domestic — wellbeing, fertility, prosperity and protection for family and community — rather than commemorative.

The practice is also deliberately shared across a border. Hıdrellez was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List in 2017 at 12.COM, nominated jointly by Türkiye and North Macedonia. The Turkish record describes this multinational element as bringing together people from different sociocultural backgrounds around a common inheritance. It is a reminder that a practice is not always the property of one state, even when an archive is organised by country.

The sources used for this entry do not differentiate practice between the two countries. This entry therefore does not attribute a specific Turkish custom to Hıdrellez, and does not import anything from the North Macedonian practice.