What is Haji Firuz?

Haji Firuz is the character who shows up in the weeks before Nowruz to announce that the new year is coming. He wears a bright red satin outfit and a tall felt hat, carries a tambourine or a small drum, and dances through streets and bazaars singing a rhyming chant whose most famous line says, roughly, that Haji Firuz is here, he comes only once a year. Everyone who grew up with it can sing the tune on demand. He sprays good cheer on whoever he passes and collects coins from shopkeepers and neighbors, a kind of seasonal busker with a cultural mandate.

His origins are argued over. A popular story links him to ancient Mesopotamian and Iranian myths of a dying and returning god, a figure who disappears under the winter earth and comes back with spring, and in some tellings to the mourning story of Siavash from the Shahnameh. Historians are cautious about drawing that line too neatly, and the Haji Firuz people see on the street today is much more recent in form. The blackened face is the part that deserves honesty. Traditionally it was said to come from soot or from the figure's journey out of the underworld, but to modern eyes, especially outside Iran, it reads as blackface, and many Iranians in the diaspora now debate whether to keep the face makeup, change it, or retire the character. In Tehran he used to be a fixture at traffic intersections and in the Grand Bazaar a week or two before the holiday, and tourists still film him dancing between cars. Many diaspora kids first meet him at a school Nowruz assembly or a community festival, where a volunteer uncle in red satin gets handed a tambourine and told to go for it.