Sham el-Nessim

A day outdoors

The name means “smelling the breeze”, and the point of the day is to be outside. Families spend it picnicking in public gardens and green spaces, along the Nile or at the zoo, and the customary foods have hardly changed for centuries: fesikh, green onions, lettuce and lupin beans, and boiled eggs dyed in bright colours. The customs are much the same throughout Egypt, but they are kept most vividly in rural villages, where Islamic, Christian and ancient Egyptian traditions blend in a communal celebration.

Older than the calendar

No one knows exactly how old Sham el-Nessim is, but it is generally held to go back to ancient Egypt. One theory derives the name from Shemu, the ancient Egyptian harvest season, and sees the holiday as a continuation of spring festivals more than 4,500 years old. Spring mattered because it marked the start of the agricultural cycle, and offerings of salted fish, lettuce, eggs and onions were once made to gods such as Ra, Amun and Ptah.

The festival survived every change of religion and ruler. In medieval Egypt it was shared by Muslims, Christians and Jews, and under the Fatimids the caliph himself led an official procession through the streets of Cairo. People wrote wishes on eggshells and hung them in trees, believing that the wishes would come true when the rising sun touched them, and spent the day by the Nile, the Khalij canal and the open spaces of Fustat. Because the Islamic calendar is lunar, the festival kept its link to the Christian date of Easter.