Naadam – the festival of manly sports

Naadam is an annual festival in Mongolia – the biggest festivity of the year.  The reason is that winter festivities like New Year fall when most nomadic communities are cut-off by the heavy snow that closes-down all of rural Mongolia for the winter months – so family get-togethers are impossible.  So when mid-summer comes, the great competition of Naadam takes places.  Naadam consisted originally of many Buddhist ceremonies and dances, but these were banned during the Communist era – some element of them has been reintroduced into the present-day Naadam.  The main activities, though, are archery, wrestling, and horse-racing – sports in which there is fierce competition and great local national interest.  Alongside this there are more low-key events that happen alongside.  What needs mentioning, however, is that the organisation of Naadam isn’t always, well, entirely smooth.  It’s even happened that the horse-racing was rescheduled earlier in the day (“hot weather – bad for horses”) and when the Presidential motorcade arrived for the start, it had actually all finished.  So bring a sense of humour and a flexible attitude when you come to Naadam, and you’ll enjoy it in all its strange and exotic glory.