Mersin’s citrus festival like a carnival

As of five years ago, every year Mersin provides an entertaining festival, the ‘Citrus Festival’ which brings different people from all over the world together in a celebration loaded with fruit Sometimes I watch video clips on YouTube where people do stupid things. They jump on a chair or table and fall down. It’s all very hilarious, but you should be careful with what you laugh at.

Last weekend I was in the southern province of Mersin. There was the annual Narenciye (citrus) festival, a new tradition that started five years ago. The father off the festival is Abdullah Özdemir who came up to organize a carnival-like citrus fruit festival in Mersin. During the five years this festival has been organized, a lot has changed. Every year they improve themselves and the Narenciye festival slowly became a kind of crossover between Carnival in Rio de Janeiro and the Bulbs Parade in the Netherlands.

Sixty-five workers work three weeks in a row to make this festival possible. Some 50,000 pieces of orange, mandarin, lemon and grapefruit are being used to make all the beautiful trailers and statues. Every year during the second week of November, hundreds of thousands of people visit this festival and at the end of the two-day-long festival, the people are allowed to take the fruit with home them.  Walking around, I noticed something very interesting. This was a real cosmopolitan and colorful festival.

The visitors of the festival walk side by side with all the different participants from 32 different countries. Most of the performers come from the Balkans, Middle Asia and Peru, and they all wear their own colorful national traditional clothing. I see bright blue jackets combined with shiny white trousers, the dancers...