First official New Year’s Eve
A law passed in 1935 made January 1 an official bank holiday, and January 1, 1936 became the first New Year holiday.
The Ottoman Empire used the Islamic calendar, and New Year’s Eve had no special meaning; it did not have any special meaning for the Christian community, either, for they celebrated the birth of Christ on December 24. Nonetheless, certain sections of society regarded New Year’s Eve as a cause for celebration and observed it in an unofficial way. The Ottoman bureaucracy was not oblivious to these celebrations. For example, Ottoman statesmen had attended the big ball given by the British envoy in ?stanbul on a ship in the Golden Horn on the New Year’s Eve of 1829.
Ahmet Rasim, the famous journalist who witnessed the last period of the Ottoman Empire, described New Year’s Eve celebrations in the following way:
On New Year’s Eve, we Turks went everywhere. We would get ourselves invited to Galata, Beyoğlu, everywhere with Orthodox communities, and would party until morning.
After the declaration of the Republic, New Year’s Eve celebrations gained a more official character with the balls attended by Atatürk, but it was still not recognized as a bank holiday. This situation was addressed with the law that restructured religious and bank holidays in 1935. The law defined Sunday as the weekend holiday, and declared January 1 as New Year holiday.
