Ramazan Bayramı

Ramazan Bayramı is the feast that closes the month of fasting. It runs for three days, from the first to the third of Şevval in the Hijri calendar. In 2027, those days fall on 9, 10 and 11 March.

The public holiday is separate from the feast, and begins earlier. Under the law on national and general holidays, Ramazan Bayramı as a holiday begins at 13:00 on the arefe — the eve — and lasts three and a half days. In 2027, offices close from the afternoon of 8 March. The same law says that when such a holiday ends on a Friday evening, the whole of the following Saturday is also a holiday.

Only one year is listed below, and that is deliberate. The dates come from the religious authority’s own calendar, which pairs each Gregorian day with its Hijri date, and that table currently reaches to the end of 2027. The archive publishes the years it has read and no others. It would be easy to compute Şevval for the next decade; those dates would not be the ones the authority has published. This archive would rather show one date it can stand behind than ten it cannot.

What the days actually involve is not described here, and that gap is real. The two sources behind this entry are a calendar and a holiday statute: one says when the feast falls, the other how long the country stops for it. Neither says what anyone does. No institutional Turkish source describing the observance, or what is expected of a visitor, has been found, so the archive does not describe it. What the law does say is that public offices and institutions close for the holiday.

Ramazan Bayramı matters here both as a religious feast and as a practice around which the working year is formally arranged. It is one of the two religious feasts the Turkish state recognises in law, alongside Kurban Bayramı. Its public-holiday window is fixed precisely: three and a half days from 13:00 on the afternoon before it begins. That precision is significant in itself: the state sets time aside for the observance, rather than treating it as incidental to the calendar.

It also explains why this archive can publish Türkiye’s dates differently from Iran’s for the same feast on the same lunar calendar. For Iran, every lunar date here is marked estimated because observance follows local sighting of the crescent, announced shortly before the fact. Türkiye’s religious authority publishes a calendar in advance. The arithmetic is the same; what differs is that a date has been committed to ahead of time, and the archive can quote a commitment where it cannot quote a prediction.