River valleys, green areas and parks, and lakeshores have become places of festive celebrations in the regions of Turkmenistan on the occasion of the Nowruz holiday. In Ashgabat, an ethnographic festival took place on the embankment of the Karakum River.
Here were yurts, exhibition pavilions as well as stages and grounds for performances were equipped. The open spaces covered with bright carpets “turned” into a blooming spring meadow, and the painted decorations assured the theatrical effect of changing interiors for each performance of the artists.
The show started with the performance by the youngest participants funny and lovely kids loudly welcomed the Nowruz and are the first to meet the guests of the event.
Then the drummers had come they imitate loud rolls of thunder and a heavy shower that follows it. It seems like a huge vat of water overturned in heaven, and the rain came down in torrents filling up the earth with a new power.
A bit later, the storm clouds disappear to let the sun to shine. It’s time to get to work, plow, sow, plant and grow it’s a time for a new agricultural year. The farmer became the protagonist of all festive dedications to Nowruz.
A marathon of performances by folk and dance ensembles, pop stars and populist musicians, choral and orchestral groups, theater and circus artists, athletes were complemented by exhibitions of painting and crafts, museum rarities and modern products of the agro-industrial complex, food and textile industries.
And, of course, the traditional way of the Nowruz celebration includes large swings and small wheat “fields” green shoots of sprouted grains on the dishes symbolize a bounteous harvest in the new year, plenty of everything and abundance of dastarkhans.
The crown of the festival, as always, was “kushtdepdi” a common dance that unites artists and spectators in a one wide circle. Personifying the stormy energy of the elements, order and harmony of the universe, creativity and the power of thought, this dance is a real hymn to the eternal and beautiful union of a man and nature.
Festivities near the Karakum River in the capital, on the territory of the Nowruz site in the Ak Bugday region, Akhal province, in the Sumbar valley, Balkan province, in the small homeland of Makhtumkuli, on the shores of Lake Yashlar in Dashoguz and in the Four Gardens park in Turkmenabat, in a meadow near 30 km of the Mary-Ashgabat highway will be held on March 22 as well.