The 2024 Kurdish Cultural Festival will take place in Stockholm, Sweden, on 1 September, World Peace Day. Embracing the diversity of Kurdish culture, the festival will include music performances alongside a special programme for children and stands providing foods from different regions of Kurdistan.
Menice Yiğit, co-chair of the Kurdish Democratic Society Centre in Sweden (NCDK-Sverige) spoke to Medya News about the preparations and programme of the festival and the importance the Kurdish diaspora gives to celebrating its culture and keeping it alive.
Explaining the importance of the festival, Menice Yiğit stated that the Kurdish community is going through an “extraordinary time, that includes both pain and happiness” and that the festival is a part of protecting Kurdish culture, as it is “a way of continuing and feeling our culture and defending our culture against assimilation”.
“The occupier [the Turkish state] is attacking our language, our culture, our traditional clothes, our songs and our dances every day and our festivals are a reaction to these attacks to show that the beauty of our culture cannot be destroyed or eradicated,” she emphasised.
Taking place on 1 September, which is also the World Peace Day, the festival’s music programme consists of acts with different dialects from all four parts of Kurdistan. The festival was prepared and arranged by the Amara Women’s Council, NCDK-Sverige and the Teşî Culture Centre.
The team of the Kurdish cultural organisation Zarok Ma will welcome children with a special programme to explore Kurdish culture, including musical and painting activities. The Platform of Kurds of Central Anatolia (PEKAN) will host a culinary experience by offering traditional Kurdish food.
There will be informative stands by different organisations such as the Kurdish institute, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), the Jineoloji (Women’s science) works and the Assyrian Beth Nahrin organisation. The stands will be accompanied by an artwork exhibition and a display of Abdullah Öcalan’s books.
Menice Yiğit highlighted that the aim of the festival is to “conclude different participants and colours in the festival in order to represent democratic confederalism.”
Democratic confederalism is a societal model developed by Abdullah Öcalan that presents an alternative system for an equal society, in which people of different nations, cultures and religions can live together peacefully while embracing their differences and diversity through a grassroots system of democracy, allowing every member of society to be politically represented.
