Why Iraqi Christians Light Fires and Carry Crosses Through the Streets Every September
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross • Ankawa & Alqosh, Iraq • An Ancient Feast, A Living Witness
Why Iraqi Christians Light Fires and Carry Crosses Through the Streets Every September
In the towns Islamic State fighters once emptied of Christians, four ancient churches now walk the same streets together, candles lit, singing the same feast in four different rites.
The Feast of the Cross — At a Glance
- Commemorates
- Dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 335 AD, and the showing of the True Cross
- Church of the East Date
- September 13
- Gregorian Date
- September 14
- Julian Calendar Date
- September 27
- Iraqi Centers
- Ankawa (Erbil) & Alqosh (Nineveh Plains)
- Churches Involved
- Chaldean Catholic • Syriac Catholic • Syriac Orthodox • Assyrian Church of the East
- Signature Custom
- Candlelight procession & the lighting of the Cross Flame
- Modern Significance
- A public, ecumenical witness following the Islamic State occupation of 2014–2017
What the Feast Commemorates
The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross traces back to a specific date in a specific city: September 13, 335 AD, when the newly built Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, raised over the traditional site of Christ's crucifixion and burial, was formally consecrated. The following day, the relic of the True Cross, discovered on the site a few years earlier, was brought out and raised, or exalted, before the assembled crowd so the faithful could venerate it. That act of raising the cross for public veneration gave the feast its name and, in most traditions, its date.
The feast gathered additional meaning three centuries later. In 614, Sassanid Persian forces captured Jerusalem and carried the relic of the True Cross away as plunder. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius recovered it in 628 and returned it to Jerusalem in a procession still remembered in the feast's liturgical texts. For a feast rooted this deeply in the experience of a relic lost to conquest and returned in triumph, it is perhaps fitting that the communities who keep it most visibly today are the ones who have lived through their own modern version of exactly that story.
Part II
How Ankawa and Alqosh Celebrate It
In Ankawa, the majority-Christian suburb of Erbil in Iraq's Kurdistan Region, the Feast of the Cross has grown into a multi-day festival that now anchors the town's religious calendar. The celebration opens with a candlelight procession, often more than a mile long, carrying a large cross from one church to another through the streets. Each day of the week that follows is hosted by a different church, so the observance moves in turn through Chaldean, Syriac Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, and Assyrian Church of the East parishes rather than staying inside any single tradition. The week traditionally closes with the lighting of the Cross Flame, a final procession that carries fire from church to church as a visible sign of the light the cross represents overcoming darkness.
In Alqosh, the ancient Christian town in the Nineveh Plains northeast of Mosul, the feast takes a more local, parish-centered form: hymns, festival meals prepared by church brotherhoods, and competitions for children, including making crosses out of paper and decorating the most beautiful cross for display. The celebrations are smaller than Ankawa's but carry their own weight, held in a town whose Christian roots reach back well over a millennium.
Part III
A Festival Rebuilt After ISIS
Between 2014 and 2017, the Islamic State occupied large parts of the Nineveh Plains, including Alqosh's neighboring towns and much of the region Iraqi Christians had called home for centuries. Tens of thousands fled, many to Ankawa itself, which absorbed a wave of displaced Christian families and has remained a center of Iraqi Christian life ever since. Church leaders in the region have put the total number of Christians remaining in all of Iraq today at roughly 300,000, a steep decline from the population before decades of war, political instability, and the Islamic State occupation combined to drive so many into exile.
It is against that backdrop that the modern, ecumenical form of the Ankawa festival carries its real weight. Church leaders have described the joint celebration explicitly as a sign that the campaign to erase a Christian presence from the region failed. Raising the cross publicly through the streets, in the same towns and sometimes on the same ground where churches were targeted a decade earlier, is not treated as incidental to the feast. For the communities involved, it is close to the entire point.
Part IV
Four Churches, One Feast
What distinguishes Iraq's modern Feast of the Cross celebrations from a typical parish feast is the deliberate involvement of four historically separate churches. Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Catholic parishes, both in communion with Rome, celebrate alongside the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, neither of which is Catholic. Church leaders have been candid that this level of coordination is new: for most of these communities' history, each church kept the feast separately, on its own calendar, in its own building.
Part V
The Ancient Roots of Christianity in the Nineveh Plains
The depth of Christian history in this specific corner of Iraq is easy to understate. St. George's Church in Ankawa, restored in 1995, bears an engraved stone recording its rebuilding in 816 AD, and parts of the structure are believed to reach back as far as the fourth century. Alqosh's own religious life centers in part on a monastery dedicated to Our Lady, whose community still hosts the town's Feast of the Cross celebrations each year. These are not recently planted parishes marking a modern feast; they are communities keeping a fourth-century commemoration on ground their ancestors have occupied for a comparable stretch of time.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
The Cross Raised in the Same Streets It Was Nearly Erased From
A festival built around raising a cross in public is never just decoration in a place like the Nineveh Plains. For the Chaldean, Syriac Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, and Assyrian Christians who keep it together each September, it is the plainest possible statement that the community meant to be erased is still here, still walking the same streets, still singing the same ancient feast.
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