Daily Times

The Parsi community of Karachi celebrated Nowruz, the first day of spring and the beginning of the year in the Persian calendar on Friday.

‘Parsi’ is a tiny religious minority community. Most of parsis are settled in the metropolis.

“It means ‘new day’. Over time, the festival has sometimes been labelled “Jamshedji” nowruz, which is a misnomer. It is Jamshedi Nowruz, named after the ancient Sassanian King Jamshed, who proclaimed the day as the start of the ancient Persian Calendar,” said Ridhwan Khan of Dawood Foundation.

To celebrate the festival, the Dawood Foundation arranged an exhibition ‘Ghar aka TDF Ghar’. “We are already having an exhibition on Moses Somake , the Irani Jewish architect of Karachi who was the mastermind behind many stone buildings in the colonial city of Karachi,” said Khan.

“‘The man who built Karachi’ is an exhibition designed solely for the residents of Karachi to celebrate the work of Iraqi descent architect Moses Somake,” Khan added.

Karachi has always been a hub for pluralistic co-existence and Parsis have a strong history with this metropolis. Many of the Parsi families living in Karachi can trace their ancestry back to the first settlers.

Published in Daily Times, August 18^th 2018.