Next: 21 Mar to 2 Apr 2027
Nowruz and nan-o-panir
The Persian new year at the spring equinox, with fresh herbs, flatbread and white cheese on every breakfast spread.
Cheeses for Nowruz and nan-o-panir
Nowruz begins at the spring equinox and its celebrations run for thirteen days. Beside the haft-sin table of symbolic things, the food is green and fresh: sabzi polo with fish on the eve, kuku sabzi, and plates of sabzi khordan, raw herbs eaten with flatbread and white cheese. Nan-o-panir-o-sabzi, bread, cheese and herbs, is the classic Iranian breakfast and the first course of many Nowruz meals. Lighvan cheese, a brined sheep's-milk cheese from a village near Tabriz, is the most prized, but any white cheese will do. Visitors are offered tea, sweets and fruit through the holiday.
The cheeses
Written by the EveryCheese desk with AI assistance. Background: "Nowruz" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Lighvan cheese: farsnews.ir, CC BY 4.0, source
- Feta: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, source