Holding Nowruz Tight
A reflection on the Iranian New Year in a time of grief
This is my third year curating the Nowruz Cultural Festival at Lauderdale House. When I first began, I could not have known how much this work would come to mean, nor how urgently Nowruz would ask to be held with care rather than certainty. I am writing now as a curator trying to hold together grief, responsibility, and love for a tradition that has shaped so many lives.
This year’s Iranian New Year, Nowruz, arrives at a moment of deep sorrow. The ongoing and horrific killing of protestors in Iran makes it impossible to greet Nowruz with easy joy or familiar celebration. To carry on as if nothing has happened would feel like a kind of forgetting, and forgetting has never been what Nowruz asks of us.
Nowruz is an ancient Iranian way of insisting on life, of marking renewal not because the world is fair, but because spring still returns. For thousands of years, Nowruz has been carried through violence, rupture, silence, and exile. It survives because people keep holding it, often quietly, often in difficult times.
At Lauderdale House, Nowruz has become more than an event. Through the festival, it has become a place where Iranians have told us they feel at home, sometimes for the first time in years. Parents have brought children to pass on something fragile and precious. Newly arrived Iranians have spoken of how much it matters to mark Nowruz together. At the same time, neighbours and visitors from across London have come to encounter Nowruz with curiosity, warmth, and respect, sharing food, poetry, music, and conversation.
This year’s Nowruz at Lauderdale House will be marked with care and intention, as a reflection, solidarity, and remembrance. It will not be loud or unthinking. It will be held gently, with attention, and grounded in what this moment asks of us.
To gather for Nowruz now is not to turn away from grief. It is to sit with it together, and to allow it a place among us. Nowruz is one of the ways we find the strength to go on.
Mehrdad Aref-Adib
Curator, Nowruz Cultural Festival at Lauderdale House
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