The Crimean Tatar religious community, which found itself on the Ukrainian mainland following the occupation of Crimea, launched a full-scale campaign against Hıdırlez in 2026.

For the first time, forces close to the Crimean Tatar representative bodies refused to support its celebration in the Ukrainian capital, and respected imams demanded, as a compromise, that all actions compromising the religion be abandoned, including the name of the holiday. Yes, they demanded that the word “Hıdırlez” be abandoned. To rule out any connection with Muslim prophets…

Hıdırlez is perhaps the most widespread and ancient holiday of the Crimean Tatars. And it is popular not only among us. It is celebrated by the Gagauz, Turkish Roma, and Balkan peoples.

The holiday clearly has pagan origins, but in Crimea and Turkey it has long been adapted to Islamic traditions, and in the Balkans and among the Gagauz — to Christian ones. Aside from the khalakhay ride, Hıdırlez has retained no rituals that could even remotely violate the rules of Islam. And the rolling of the khalakhay, which symbolizes the weather forecast for the current agricultural year, can be viewed as harmless entertainment rather than serious divination, so as to reassure sensitive imams and avoid introducing shirk (unacceptable innovations in Islam).

But for the most part, the clergy of the Abrahamic religions are known for flexibility only in the face of the threat of annihilation and for complete intransigence when they sense even the slightest superiority…

In Crimea, the exact opposite process took place. Official Islam has smothered the local holiday in its embrace. Hıdırlez, which drew 35,000 people to the Aqmescit-Bağçasaray highway in 2013, has been appropriated by the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Crimea since 2015. And now it is a festival of occupying unity, which decent people try to avoid.

The sad irony is that Hıdırlez is being discredited by two irreconcilable sides in Crimea and on the mainland, and it seems it has no chance of surviving in the beautiful form in which it has come down to us from antiquity. This spring festival, during which the deceased are commemorated and their graves tended during the day, and people sing and dance in the evening to celebrate the arrival of summer, is under threat of destruction from both opportunistic Islamists and Muslim passionaries.

The latter behave just like the Greeks of early Christianity, who took pleasure in destroying monuments of ancient architecture and literature. After all, these were symbols of pagan idolatry. Only later, before the Renaissance, was what had survived passed on to Europeans… by progressive Muslims.

What will destroy Hıdırlez first: the discrediting of collaborators or the literalism of the Salafis, whose religious views have prevailed in the Kyiv diaspora and the Kyiv Muftiate?

I recall the early 1980s. Religious observances of Ramadan and Qurban Bayram were celebrated exclusively within the family circle, and people gathered in any significant numbers on only one date — May 5–6, during the days of Hıdırlez, at the Muslim cemeteries of Crimea. That Crimea, into which the repressed people began to return starting in the 1960s.

By the early 1980s, there were barely 5,000–7,000 Crimean Tatars across the entire peninsula. Ninety percent of the people lived in Uzbekistan. These 5,000–7,000 are the very same die-hard fanatics who for years have “violated passport regulations” and lived without residency registration (the ban on residency registration for Crimean Tatars was the only tool the Soviet authorities used to restrict the people’s right to return to their homeland). No registration means no work, so many survive in the traditional Crimean way: growing seedlings, vegetables, and fruits, selling them at local markets, as well as raising sheep, processing wool, and producing yarn for knitting.

There are two legal occasions for community gatherings: weddings and funerals. No mosques or prayer houses. Only on Hıdırlez, which brought together several families at cemeteries and then at picnics, did the Soviet authorities turn a blind eye.

It was on Hıdırlez that people recited Muslim prayers together.

The pagan heritage helped the people practice Islam during the hardest years, when many of today’s Islamic purists and their parents were living relatively happy lives in Uzbekistan.

Today, Hıdırlez is becoming a bastion of national unity, connecting us through its cultural heritage to ancient Crimea and its vanished peoples. If Hıdırlez falls, we may first forget about Derviza, then about the barely revived Kalanda, and even Ashure, Mevlyud, and Kandil — which seem entirely Muslim to us — will be relegated to the category of heretical innovations from the apocrypha.

One can, of course, explain the current intransigence of the religious segment of mainland Crimeans by the stress they are experiencing along with all of Ukraine in this great war. Religiosity becomes the sole irrational mechanism for survival. Categorical and uncompromising attitudes prevail, leaving no room for sentimentality.

Hıdırlez is going through its “perdalez” — with this word, which sounds funny to Slavic ears, the Crimean Tatars refer to the changeable weather in February, when winter resists the arrival of spring. But even the longest “perdalez” cannot outlast March, and spring comes anyway, followed by Hıdırlez.

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