Marking the beginning of spring, Navruz (meaning March equinox) is one of the largest traditional holidays in Central Asia. Located in the heart of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan has been celebrating Navruz (Nooruz in Kyrgyz) for a long time as its national holiday. When the Navruz holiday comes, Kyrgyz families gather to make holiday desserts: sumolok and boorsok.\n\nIn the old times, sumolok was a ritual dish prepared before the start of spring sowing. Sumolok is a sweet paste made from germinated wheat and stir cooked in a kazan, a large traditional pot in Central Asia. Sumolok has become an important cuisine in Kyrgyz culture since almost all of Kyrgyzstan celebrates the holiday by making it. In villages and towns, families gather around a kazan full of sumolok and take turns to stirring the sumolok. Usually it takes a whole day and night to finish the cuisine, which is why a typical Navruz scene in Kyrgyzstan is pictured as a group of families sitting around a Kazan while singing and stirring sumolok.\n\nBoorsok, on the other hand, is cooked faster than sumolok. Also a traditional sweet in Central Asia, boorsok is a type of fried dough in various shapes. Kyrgyz boorsok is typically shaped like a pressed doughnut.\n\nThis year, Boorsok National Record was held in the Arashan village near the capital city, Bishkek. The event was organized by Ethnographic Complex Kyrgyz Aiyli (meaning Kyrgyz village), successfully attracting an estimated 1,500 local residents and tourists. The main programs included making boorsok, singing songs, and competing in horse riding and other national games. The participants in the boorsok cooking competition used about a ton of flour and made more than 800 kg of boorsok. Later, boxes of boorsok were sent to nearby orphanages and the elderly in Arashan Village.\n\nMarking the beginning of spring, Navruz (meaning March equinox) is one of the largest traditional holidays in Central Asia. Located in the heart of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan has been celebrating Navruz (Nooruz in Kyrgyz) for a long time as its national holiday. When the Navruz holiday comes, Kyrgyz families gather to make holiday desserts: sumolok and boorsok.\n\nIn the old times, sumolok was a ritual dish prepared before the start of spring sowing. Sumolok is a sweet paste made from germinated wheat and stir cooked in a kazan, a large traditional pot in Central Asia. Sumolok has become an important cuisine in Kyrgyz culture since almost all of Kyrgyzstan celebrates the holiday by making it. In villages and towns, families gather around a kazan full of sumolok and take turns to stirring the sumolok. Usually it takes a whole day and night to finish the cuisine, which is why a typical Navruz scene in Kyrgyzstan is pictured as a group of families sitting around a Kazan while singing and stirring sumolok.\n\nBoorsok, on the other hand, is cooked faster than sumolok. Also a traditional sweet in Central Asia, boorsok is a type of fried dough in various shapes. Kyrgyz boorsok is typically shaped like a pressed doughnut.\n\nThis year, Boorsok National Record was held in the Arashan village near the capital city, Bishkek. The event was organized by Ethnographic Complex Kyrgyz Aiyli (meaning Kyrgyz village), successfully attracting an estimated 1,500 local residents and tourists. The main programs included making boorsok, singing songs, and competing in horse riding and other national games. The participants in the boorsok cooking competition used about a ton of flour and made more than 800 kg of boorsok. Later, boxes of boorsok were sent to nearby orphanages and the elderly in Arashan Village.\n\nMore information about Navruz is available in ICHCAP’s e-Knowledge Center.\n\nWatch Other Navruz Videos\nNavruz is celebrated throughout Central Asia, with each ethnic group having its own take on the holiday. The videos of Tajik and Uzbek celebrations below are from ICHCAP’s Central Asia ICH Collection.

Long known as the cradle of civilization, the area that bounds from the fertile valleys of Al-Hasakeh, across the ancient deserts of Palmyra, and westward to the Mediterranean Sea, includes present-day Syria. Due to the vastness of the region, it is no wonder that Syrian cuisine boasts a rich culinary heritage dened by exceptional diversity and human creativity.

The Azerbaijani Carpet Makers Union (ACMU), founded in January 2010, is a voluntary self-governmental public association of citizens rallied to support Azerbaijani carpet weaving.The ACMU seeks to promote a revival of the powerful spiritual heritage of carpets, the national traditions of the Azerbaijani people, a consolidation of the creative potential of seen figures of society and culture, support for talented children and youth, and creative carpet dynasties. The purpose of the ACMU is also to convey objective information about the unique national culture, rich historical heritage, and diversity of the carpet art of Azerbaijan to the international community.

Central Asia stands at the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Its territory, crossed by the northern part of the great Silk Road, constitutes an ensemble of cultural heritage sites and monuments that express common historical experiences as well as reflect an extraordinary cultural diversity dating from prehistoric times to the Islamic period and beyond. For centuries, the phenomenon of intangible cultural heritage was a key factor for the transmission of indigenous cultural traditions for future generations as well as a matching point for intercultural dialogue in Central Asia—a region with unique oral and music traditions.

The tug-of-war is one of the most well-known intangible cultural heritage elements that represent the Republic of Korea. Tug-of-war games were widely enjoyed by people across the country before the 1930s and 1940s. During the 1960s, the tug-of-war came under the protection of the Cultural Heritage Conservation Policy and has been appointed and is being managed by local and national governments. Locally, eight tug-of-war traditions have been inscribed on the national inventory list. Moreover, compared to other ICH element studies, of the element has been significantly researched.\n\nTug-of-war is a cultural heritage element of many East Asian nations, and these nations are preparing to nominate the element to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In this context, the goal of this paper is to discover universal traits in tug-of-war traditions in East Asia. However, besides the Republic of Korea and Japan, there is insufficient research on tug-of-war traditions in the region, which limits the scope of this presentation. In case of China, despite the existence of various records on tug-of-war in literature, the tradition as it exists in China today seems to be more of a sports match than a ritual event. I would also like to mention that this paper is a draft based on document records, the Internet, and the academic symposium hosted by Gijisi Tug-of-War Conservation Institute.

The Azerbaijani Carpet Makers Union (ACMU), founded in January 2010, is a voluntary self-governmental public association of citizens rallied to support Azerbaijani carpet weaving. The ACMU seeks to promote a revival of the powerful spiritual heritage of carpets, the national traditions of the Azerbaijani people, a consolidation of the creative potential of seen figures of society and culture, support for talented children and youth, and creative carpet dynasties. The purpose of the ACMU is also to convey objective information about the unique national culture, rich historical heritage, and diversity of the carpet art of Azerbaijan to the international community.

The Central Asian region is a unique area where centuries-old civilisations, religions, and cultures have intersected. The region’s ICH provides the basis for historical self-identification of the people that inhabit the region, and this ICH has influence on their future spiritual development. The ancestral heritage is intertwined in a vast cultural material, which reveals itself in folklore, legends, festivals, and games; in the rules and norms of social behaviour; in music, songs, and dances; and in national costumes as well as in decorative and applied arts and crafts.

Lialiaci is a publication of the iTaukei Institute of Language and Culture, Ministry of iTaukei Affairs. Lialiaci means to ponder or reflect upon deeply.\n\nThat is the intent of these articles and perspectives on culture.

The food we eat is an important part of culture. It is also an expression of community identity. As American folklorist Millie Rahn writes, The kitchen, historically, is the place where families gather and where the everyday and the ceremonial meet and overlap. Here families interact and share private traditions, expressing identity through their food to each other and to the world. Creativity is alive in this space, from daily mealtimes to more elaborate feasts that mark rites of passage, religious and secular holidays, and other special events. This is where knowledge is passed on, from traditional ways of preparing and using various ingredients, implements, tools, and techniques to legends, stories, anecdotes, and cultural exchanges that have become part of familial and regional folklife. We all eat, and associate different layers of cultural meaning to the food we consume. Explorations of food, then, can be an easy conduit into the complex world of intangible cultural heritage. This article gives several examples from the safeguarding initiatives of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador that have used foodways as a means to get people thinking about, and engaged with, concepts of cultural transmission and heritage conservation.

Based on a common geographical environment, the people of East Asia share a similar sense of the seasons and have been sharing the seasonal festival traditions for many years, which to a certain degree has brought commonality to their experience of heritage. The seasonal festival traditions in East Asia have a localized form of expression and common features.2) They all attach importance to seasonal nodes such as the Mid-Autumn Festival, Half of July, April Eight, and the Twenty-four Solar Terms. They value family ethics in the practice of festivals and share Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist cultural traditions, with emphasis on “red-hot sociality.” As they collectively enjoy seasonal festivities, they continue creating arts-related activities around these festivals and transmitting their heritage values to the younger generation. East Asia's practices of seasonal festival traditions are both a manifestation of cultural diversity and cultural sharing. This presentation will discuss the sharing, sustaining, and collaborative safeguarding f East Asian Seasonal Festivals as ICH.

Water bodies in the mountainous and coastal regions of Azerbaijan, including rivers, lakes, springs, and waterfalls, host many cultural ecosystems. These have led to both tangible and intangible cultural heritage creation and contain a perfect level of human–nature relations. Climate change is a complex phenomenon that is affecting all areas of human life, including \nwater-related ICH. Its effects cause existing traditions, knowledge, and skills to be gradually abandoned and forgotten, which in turn leads to the disappearance of ICH. Global climate change also affects employment among the population in other areas, such as agriculture and reduces traditional incomes. This leads to the gradual migration of the rural population to urban areas and, as a result, the loss of traditions related to intangible cultural values.

Water puppetry is identified widely as an artistic form that has sprung from the characteristics of particular landscapes and the lives and shared stories of their communities. In the Red River Delta (RRD) in Vietnam, it is documented as having developed in the rice-growing area in the tenth/eleventh century (Dunning, 1996 2021; Gaboriault, 2009), with the first physical evidence of performance held in the Th\nầy Temple, Hà Tây Province, during the Late Lê (Ly) Dynasty (1428–1778). The inscription on the Sùng Thiên Diên Linh stone stele (tablet) of 1121 at the Doi San ̣Pagoda, Duy Tien District (around 50 kilometers from Hanoi), provides evidence of water puppetry based on stories that reflect local lives and livelihoods and mythical creatures such as the golden tortoise, fairies, and flocks of birds and animals singing and dancing (Hai, 2006). Water puppet performance is a collaboration between puppeteers, musicians, the audience, and, \nimportantly, the character of the staging and spatial context of the performance within water landscapes. Today, performances generally consist of a series of short vignettes based on stories of traditional delta life and livelihoods, commonly interspersed with folk tales and mythological characters.