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Marrakesh Hosts 6th Moroccan Poetry Festival

The House of Poetry in Marrakesh is set to host a three-day event presenting more than 30 Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals. WAM
The House of Poetry in Marrakesh is set to host a three-day event presenting more than 30 Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals. WAM
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Marrakesh Hosts 6th Moroccan Poetry Festival

The House of Poetry in Marrakesh is set to host a three-day event presenting more than 30 Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals. WAM
The House of Poetry in Marrakesh is set to host a three-day event presenting more than 30 Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals. WAM

The sixth edition of the Moroccan Poetry Festival was inaugurated on Friday evening in Marrakesh, under the patronage of Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member, Ruler of Sharjah, alongside Moroccan King Mohammed VI of Morocco, Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported.

The House of Poetry in Marrakesh, in partnership with the Department of Culture in Sharjah and the Moroccan Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Communication, is set to host a three-day event presenting more than 30 Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals, WAM said.

The opening ceremony was held at the historic Cyber Park Arsat Moulay Abdesalam in Marrakesh, featuring notable attendees such as Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Owais, Head of the Department of Culture in Sharjah; Mohammed Ibrahim Al Qaseer, Director of Cultural Affairs in Sharjah's Department of Culture; and Hisham Aboukari, Director of the Arts Sector, who represented Dr. Mohammed Al Mahdi bin Saeed, Morocco’s Minister of Youth, Culture, and Communication. The event drew a significant crowd of literary enthusiasts.

The Moroccan Poetry Festival this year coincides with Marrakesh being named the Islamic World Cultural Capital for 2024, underscoring the city's profound cultural, historical, and heritage importance.

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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)

Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply yearning for the promise of spring marked the dawn of the shortest day of the year at the ancient Stonehenge monument on Saturday.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. (0809 GMT) over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice — the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. No one could see the sun through the low winter cloud, but that did not deter a flurry of drumming, chanting and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday — but after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only occasions when visitors can go right up to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands are willing to rise before dawn to soak up the atmosphere.

The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected starting about 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshiping Neolithic culture, according to The AP. Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or some combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

That follows from the recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site. Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west,

Lead author Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”