Friday, September 11, 2009

Cairo's unique Ramadan traditions

Interesting article from Gulf News on the unique traditions of Ramadan practiced in Egypt.

I must admit, I have only seen the fanoos in Egypt during Ramadan, not in any other part of the world, so I did know about that. But I've never heard about the Yameesh, which nut is this?

Edited on 13 Sep, to add:
Thanks everyone for the clarifications of Yameesh being any combination of nuts and dry fruits. I guess the reported got it wrong about the Yameesh being unique to Egypt.

So that means, its only the Ramadan Fanoos that is unique to Egypt, or is there anything else that you know of?

7 comments:

AmaneeM said...

Here's an article on yameesh (I guess it's the name for all the nuts and dried fruits).

http://www.businesstodayegypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6992

Kim said...

Thanks for that. Although the Gulf News article said it was some particular kind of nut. (though they could have got it wrong) Will have to ask one of my Egyptian friends to show me the nuts or the mixture as it may be

La Gitana said...

yameesh is just the name for all dried fruit that is sold during ramadan, including dates. I think the article got it completely confused. I'm assuming the person quoted as saying yameesh is completely necessary was referring to dates.

MADO said...

The word originally not Arabic there in controversy about it could be delivered from Persian language and that because it came with Fatimid era ,it originally means fruit and nuts because for that time Egyptians weren’t farm fruits nether nuts but now it use for meaning of pistachio and hazelnuts and walnut and for very poor people include the peanut also as it’s the cheapest thing in nut family in Egypt and still include some types of dry fruits which still imported from Syria and Greek mostly.

Kim said...

Thanks for the clarification(s) :)

Jaz said...

It can be a mix of nuts (walnuts, almonds, pistachio) dried fruits (raisins, currents, apricots, figs etc.)
I guess it's like muesli without the oats lol but I didn't know that it was unique to Egypt - I'm quite sure that it is sold elsewhere (maybe not under the same name?)

Muhammed said...

I've just seen ur blog..i really found it so interesting and nice..
yes,...fanoos ramadan is really unique thing in egypt...by the way,..most of the traditions in ramadan were first appeared in egypt..one of them is the fast breaking cannon..u know it..?
it was the way to tell people about the time of fast break at the sunset...and it was first used in egypt then the idea began to move to the other islamic lands like syria...jordan..iraq and palastine..
waiting for ur coming posts

Related Posts with Thumbnails

ShareThis