Nauryz

Celebrated each March 21st to mark the spring equinox, Nauryz stands as Kazakhstan's most anticipated cultural holiday, symbolising renewal, prosperity and the beginning of the new year according to ancient Turkic tradition. UNESCO added the festival to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, formally recognising its significance across the wider Turkic and Persian world.

Nauryz kozhe, a ritual soup made from exactly seven ingredients — meat, water, flour, oil, grain, salt and milk — sits at the absolute heart of the celebration, with each ingredient representing one of seven traditional values including growth, luck, wisdom and health. At public celebrations, enormous communal cauldrons of the soup are prepared and ladled out completely free to anyone who approaches, a genuinely striking act of shared hospitality that runs through the entire festival. Beshbarmak, Kazakhstan's national dish of boiled meat and flat noodles, and baursak, pyramids of deep-fried dough puffs, round out the festive table, while cities and villages transform into festival grounds filled with yurts, horseback games like kokpar, and folk performances on the dombra.

Given the number seven's deep symbolic weight in Nauryz tradition — seven bowls served to elders, seven guests invited, seven households visited — the festival offers visitors a genuinely structured, meaningful way to understand Kazakh values, expressed through food that carries far more significance than its ingredients alone might suggest.