Yennayer

Yennayer is the Amazigh new year. In Morocco it is a national holiday on 14 January. The state lists it on the same page as the Gregorian new year on 1 January and the first of Muharram, so the country formally keeps three new years.

That is the whole of what this entry can say at present, and the gap is important. The archive has the date from the government holiday list. It has not found an institutional Moroccan source describing what the day involves — what is eaten, what is done, or how observance differs between regions — so it does not describe any of it. The Amazigh new year is kept in several countries and takes different forms in each; nothing about the Moroccan form is asserted here on the strength of what happens elsewhere.

Yennayer is a public holiday rather than an occasion with a venue, so there is no single place to go and no single thing to watch. Expect offices and public administration to be closed.

What makes Yennayer worth recording here is not the celebration, which this archive has not yet sourced, but its standing. A state that prints three new years on one page — solar, Islamic and Amazigh — is making a statement about whose calendar counts, and the Amazigh one is the most recent of the three to be given that place.

For an archive organised by country it is also a useful correction. Morocco is easy to file beside the archive’s other Islamic-calendar volumes and then read as a variation on them. The date that opens this volume belongs to none of that.