Persia, a Museum of Materials · Hall 12 · Mirrors & Words

The moment of Nowruz

The Iranian year does not begin at midnight. It begins at the instant the sun crosses the equator of the sky on its way north, the March equinox, and that instant is the same for everyone on Earth, whatever their clocks say. Families sit round the haft-sin table and count down to it. Here you can work it out for any year and any city, to the second, and see where the sun stands as the year turns.

Nowruz 1406 · in … d

Tehran · 2026 · 18:15

The year turns

18:15:35

Friday 20 March 2026 · Tehran time · UTC+3:30

New Year’s Day

1 Farvardin 1405

Saturday 21 March 2026 · The moment came after noon in Tehran (18:15, 29 Esfand 1404), so the next day begins the year.

The sun in Tehran

0.8° below the horizon

evening · low in the west, setting · rises 06:08 · sets 18:15

Year City

Why 20 March, or 21

Every year the moment comes about 5 hours 49 minutes later on the clock, and every leap year it jumps back a day. If it falls before noon in Tehran, that day is 1 Farvardin; if after noon, the next day is. Green years begin on 20 March, orange years on the 21st; the few grey years, like 1903, begin on the 22nd.

Material: Mirror-work, sprouted wheat, painted eggs
The instant: The March equinox, one moment for the whole Earth
The rule: Before noon by Iran’s clock: that day. After noon: the next day.
The calendar: Jalali, 1079; the present form by law in 1925
Listed by UNESCO: Nowruz, 2009, 2016 and 2024; mirror-work, 2025

Try this

Keep Tehran and look at 2026: the year 1405 turns at 18:15, as the sun touches the western horizon. Switch to Los Angeles: the same instant is 07:45 in the morning, with the sun low in the east.
Step through the years with the arrow keys on the slider and watch the moment slide across the day in the chart below. Every fourth year it jumps back; every so often the jump lands on the far side of noon, and Nowruz moves to 21 March.
Go back to 1079, the year Omar Khayyam and his colleagues set the Jalali calendar going: the moment falls on 15 March, because the Julian calendar had drifted about six days from the sun since Roman times; by 1582 the gap was ten.

The instant is computed with Jean Meeus’s method from Astronomical Algorithms (1998): a mean date corrected by 24 periodic terms, then ΔT to bring it from atomic to civil time. For recent years it agrees with the official Iranian figures from the Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran, to within about half a minute; for years far in the future ΔT cannot be known in advance and the seconds are a guess. Clock times use each city’s present-day time zone, with daylight saving where it is in force in March; Iran has kept standard time all year since 2023. Dates before October 1582 are in the Julian calendar then in use.

The table of seven S

Before the year turns, the family lays a cloth and sets on it seven things whose Persian names begin with the letter sin, س. The meanings given to them differ from book to book and family to family; these are the usual ones. Beside the seven sit a mirror, candles, painted eggs, a bowl with a goldfish, a hyacinth, coins and a book: a holy book, or the Divan of Hafez. The seven-S list in this form is not ancient; it is hardly mentioned before the twentieth century. The cloth itself is older: the eggs and the greenery were on the shah’s cloth, laid out in a hall of mirrors, when Chardin watched the Safavid court keep Nowruz in the 1670s; the mirror and the candles on the cloth are attested later.

1سبزهsabzehwheat, lentil or barley sprouted in a dishrebirth and the green of spring
2سمنوsamanua sweet paste cooked from sprouted wheatabundance
3سنجدsenjedthe dried fruit of the oleaster treelove
4سیرsirgarlichealth
5سیبsibapplesbeauty and health
6سماقsomāqthe red spicethe colour of sunrise
7سرکهserkehvinegarage and patience

a mirror (آینه) · candles (شمع) · goldfish in a bowl (ماهی قرمز) · painted eggs (تخم‌مرغ رنگی) · hyacinth (سنبل) · coins (سکه) · a holy book, or the Divan of Hafez (کتاب)

Words that travelled

Persian words have been leaving home for two and a half thousand years: with the Greeks who wrote about Persia, with the caravans, with chess, with the Mughal court and the British in India. Choose a word and follow its road into English.

The oldest

The game of kings

Materials

Cloth

The road and the market

The garden and the kitchen

Travellers’ words

And the peach, Latin mālum persicum, is not from Persian but from Persia: “the Persian apple”.

A calendar set by the sun

In 1079 the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk gathered astronomers, Omar Khayyam among them, to reform the Persian year. Their Jalali calendar began each year on the day the sun entered Aries before noon, so that it never drifted from the seasons: it keeps to the sun at least as well as the Gregorian calendar that Europe adopted five hundred years later. The present Solar Hijri calendar, fixed by the Iranian parliament on 31 March 1925, keeps that rule, with noon on Iran’s official clock as the line: its leap years fall where the sun puts them, eight in most cycles of thirty-three years.

A wall of mirrors

Āyeneh-kāri, mirror-work, sets thousands of small pieces of mirror into plaster, each at a slightly different angle, so that a room glitters like frost. It grew in Safavid Isfahan, where mirrors imported from Venice were precious and, the story goes, often arrived broken; the earliest recorded mirror mosaic covered the dome of the Āyeneh-khāneh, a riverside pavilion in Isfahan where Shah Soltan Hosayn was crowned in 1694 and which survives only in travellers’ drawings; the oldest that still stands is at Chehel Sotun, restored after a fire in 1706. Chardin saw the shah’s Nowruz cloth laid out in a hall of mirrors. By the Qajar period whole halls were lined with it: the Hall of Mirrors of the Golestan Palace in Tehran, built in the 1870s and painted by Kamal-ol-Molk in 1896, and the shrine of Shah Cheragh in Shiraz. In December 2025 UNESCO listed the craft itself as intangible heritage. The mirror on the Nowruz table belongs to the same taste: light, multiplied.

A festival of many countries

Nowruz is older than any of the states that keep it. It is a public holiday in Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq and Albania, and is kept in Afghanistan, in Kurdish regions, in Kosovo and by Parsis in India. UNESCO listed it as intangible heritage of humanity in 2009 on the proposal of seven countries, and extended the listing in 2016 and 2024; thirteen countries now share it. In February 2010 the United Nations declared 21 March the International Day of Nowruz.

Episode 12 of 12 · the finale

Still alive today

Nowruz is still the new year for more than 300 million people, from the Balkans to Central Asia; in Iran, families still count down to the very second at the haft-sin table.

The other half of this hall
Yalda · the longest nightStay up through it →

Questions people ask

When is Nowruz 1406?

The year turns on Saturday 20 March 2027 at 23:54 Tehran time, 20:24 UTC. That is after noon, so 1 Farvardin 1406 is Sunday 21 March 2027.

Is it really the same moment everywhere?

Yes. The equinox is an event in the sky, not on a clock. In 2026 it is 18:15 in Tehran, 14:45 in London, 07:45 in Los Angeles and 01:45 the next morning in Sydney; one instant, four clocks.

Why does the day change between 20 and 21 March?

Because a year is about 365 days and 6 hours long, the moment comes almost six hours later every year and jumps back a day at each leap year. The Iranian rule looks at where it lands relative to noon in Tehran; the Gregorian calendar just lets it wander between the 19th and the 21st.

How exact is the calculation?

To within a minute over many centuries, and within about half a minute of the official Iranian times for recent years: for 1405 the Calendar Centre of the Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran, gives 18:15:59, and this page gives 18:15:35. The official figures use the full theory of the sun; the second-by-second value for future years depends on the Earth’s rotation, which no one can predict exactly.

What does the mirror on the table mean?

Families say different things: light, honesty, reflection on the year gone by. What is certain is that the mirror, with candles beside it, appears at every Persian threshold ceremony, at weddings as well as at Nowruz.

Where does the word Nowruz come from?

From Middle Persian nōg rōz, “new day”. The name is not in the Avesta and not in any Achaemenid inscription; the oldest description of the festivities is the Parthian romance Vis and Ramin, and the Shahnameh gives the festival to the mythical king Jamshid. Whether Persepolis was built for Nowruz is still argued.

Continue your visit

After the last episode…

The next one is yours: the next Persian year turns at the March equinox, a single instant all over the Earth, and the exhibit above works out exactly when.

EarlierYalda special · The longest nightOpen the special →From the startHall 1 · Painted Clay · Spin the gobletBack to episode 1 →The museumThe entrance · all twelve halls, oldest firstBack to the entrance →

Sources: Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (2nd ed., 1998), chapters 7, 12, 25 and 27; NASA, “Polynomial expressions for ΔT”; Calendar Centre, Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran; Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Nowruz” and “Āyina-kāri”; UNESCO Representative List, “Nowruz” (2009, 2016, 2024) and “Ayeneh-kari” (2025); UN General Assembly resolution 64/253 (2010); Online Etymology Dictionary for the words; Wikipedia, “Solar Hijri calendar”, “Jalali calendar”, “Haft-sin” and “Golestan Palace”.

The sky, the table and the mirror-work are drawn with code by Bridge Labs.