First of July Festival Turkey

The Evvel Temmuz Festival is a culturally significant and grassroots community event held every year in Samandağ, Hatay, from 12 to 14 July. Its name, Evvel Temmuz (meaning “the first of July” in the old Rumi calendar), refers to an ancient seasonal turning point. While today it aligns with the modern calendar’s mid-July, its origins stretch far deeper.The festival connects to 4,000-year-old fertility and harvest rituals once celebrated across ancient civilizations of the Middle East. Known by various names—Tammuz in Sumer, Adonis in Phoenicia, and Osiris in Egypt—the tradition honored the cycle of death and rebirth through nature and the harvest. In this region, the celebration evolved within Arap Alevi (Nusayri) culture, becoming a key ritual that blends the sacred and seasonal, the earthly and ancestral.Although the Evvel Temmuz holiday was once celebrated more widely, it faced significant pressure during periods of cultural suppression, particularly after the 1980 coup in Turkey. It was only in the early 2000s that the people of Samandağ began to revitalize the tradition as a public festival, transforming it into a powerful event for cultural expression, coexistence, and heritage preservation.