Eid mubarak/Bayramınız mübarek olsun to my fellow Muslims. It's Eid, so here's something about Eid/Ramazan bayrami in the Ottoman Empire

The end of Ramadan is marked by a three to four days of holiday called şeker bayramı (Sweet Festival), ramazan bayramı (Ramadan Festival), or just simply bayram. After the new moon was sighted, the end of Ramadan was officially proclaimed with cannon salute at the Imperial Palace and elsewhere. The lights and lamps decorating the minarets were extinguished, and drums and trumpets were played in public places and the homes of high government officials and court dignitaries.

At dawn on the morning of the first of Shawwal, people woke up, bathed, perfumed, and dressed in their finest clothing to attend congregational prayer (salat al-fitr). People then assembled inside large mosques or large fields especially set aside for prayer. There, led by an imam, they performed prayers. After the end of the prayer, the imam delivered a sermon. Once prayers had ended, all embraced and wished one another a happy and healthy bayram. After prayer, some people set off for cemeteries, where temporary markets were set up to sell flowers, prayer books, and water for watering the plants around the grave. Families then gathered in silence at the tombs of parents and close relatives. They then returned to their homes, to celebrate with friends and families around them. An important part of the bayram was the restoration of friendship between those who had quarreled or hurt each other’s feelings, so people met with each other and forgave each other.

In many mixed communities, Muslims and non-Muslims also celebrated the bayram with each other. In Smyrna, during bayram, a local claimed "The Turks would flock to our coffeehouses to find ouzo and to celebrate. Generally, we’d only go to their coffeehouses for work reasons, and they would do the same". Another local also said "We’d celebrated bayram with them and enjoyed the revelry through to morning". One Kiriakos Kilitzis from Ankara recalled how both Easter and bayram (both festivals sometimes happened within a week) called for visits between friends: "My father had a friend called Hussein. He’d come to our house for Easter, and for bayram we’d go to his place". Many also said how exchange of gifts during bayram and Easter signaled a gesture of mutual respect: "They would come during Easter and bring gifts. They gave gifts to their friends, to the people that they knew well, to their gardiako [‘friends of the heart’], a lamb, and would say: ‘Bayramı mubarek olsun’, ‘may your bayram be blessed’". Simeon Radev from Bulgaria also shared the same sentiment: "Turks and Bulgarians lived together and were good neighbors. On holidays they exchanged pleasantries. We sent the Turks kozunak and red eggs at Easter, and they sent us baklava at bayram. And on these occasions we visited each other". Fotini Tzamtzi of Chios also stated "On Şeker Bayramı, they would give me sweets. These things we ate very happily! And we would give them red eggs at Easter as well as tsourekia. They were thrilled to receive these gifts".

The rest of the day was spent in leisure and entertainment. Ramadan was a month of high spending, and the bayram was no exception. People gave out food and alms for the poor, parents bought new clothes for their children, and people gave presents to families or friends. People went to the streets in their best clothes and go to festivals, shops, and coffeehouses to buy goods and enjoyed various amusements. One of the great attractions from these festivals were the bayram swings, a gigantic swing people could use for a fee. Children, in their new clothes took their pocket money and spent it in great excitement on the big swings, revolving wheels and merry-go-rounds which were set up in festivals in different parts of the city. In some places, boys hired little donkeys and cart-horses, or the little carts which the animals pulled. Here were also sold all sorts of different sweets and candies and foods which children loved. Saraçoğlu described the atmosphere pretty well: "It was above all for the children that the bayrams, şeker bayramı, and the four-day kurban bayramı, of Istanbul in the old days were, in the true meaning of the term, happy periods in which hours of pleasure, gaiety, hope and joy chased after each other. School holidays, new clothes from head to foot, pockets full of shiny, new kuruş and 50-piaster coins like horseshoes". Other forms of entertainments included Karagöz shadow-play, janissary marching bands, and in the late Ottoman Empire, various concerts, plays, and theaters.

Sources:

A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul by Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet

The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 by Donald Quataert

Daily Life in The Ottoman Empire by Mehrdad Kia

Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia by Nicholas Doumanis

Norse religion is an oxymoron. There was no canon, no dogma, no clerical hierarchy, no organization structure, no infrastructure to support priests or sacred sites, and no popular participation in the pagan "religion". Instead I think it is far more apt to describe "Norse religion" as a religious tradition, which I will shorthand to just Norse paganism. Now this is ultimately somewhat Eurocentric of me, with "religion" bearing the hallmarks of Western religions like Christianity, however since your question is concerned with Christianity specifically lets just roll with it.

I'm going to split this answer into a few parts, one detailing Norse paganism, one Christianity in the early Middle Ages, and finally the process of conversion.

Part 1: Norse Religious Tradition, what it was and what it was not

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Norse mythology is something that many of us in the western world are broadly familiar with, but only on the surface level. Odin is the All-father, Thor has a hammer, he fights giants, Loki is in there, and so on. However what we "know" about Norse mythology is mostly derived from a series of saga stories that were written down by Christians, and mostly on particular Christian (Snorri Sturluson) in Iceland centuries after conversion. The deities that we know and love, Heimdall, Tyr, Loki, all of whom are actually relatively unattested in place name evidence are common in the sagas, and vice versa, deities such as Ullr rarely appear in the saga literature despite far more evidence of a widespread cult based on place names. How are we to reconcile this difference between the literary evidence and the archaeological, especially in light of the reliability of the literary evidence compared to the archeological?

There are a few other written sources that are slightly more contemporary, such as the Poetic Edda (which predates the official conversion of most of the Norse world, but only just) and Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum which was written by a Danish Christian. Ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus people in his own journeys is also often used as a source on Scandinavia, despite the fact that he was writing about Russia and modern scholarship is increasingly nuancing the idea of Scandinavian domination of Russia.

To be clear though, using these sources to try and reconstruct the cosmology, theology, eschatology, beliefs, practices, rituals, and view point of Norse pagans is a fool's errand. The sagas have about as much to do with the practice of Norse paganism as Disney's Hercules does with Graeco-Roman paganism of the 4th century BC.

So with that out of the way what do we know about Norse paganism and what are our sources? (In the interest of time and space, I'm not going to be detailing each individual practice, ritual, and so on that we have evidence for, but rather detail a broad conclusions that some scholars have arrived at)

We are largely left with archaeological evidence (physical objects such as rune stones, artifacts, place name evidence, and so on), contemporary accounts from outside the Norse world, and extremely curated selections from the surviving corpus of Old Norse literature. So what do these sources tell us? What secrets can they reveal to the intrepid researchers of today?

In short, that the old Norse pagan religious tradition was elitist and extremely insular (not to mention barbaric, including human sacrifices and, if Ibn Fadlan is to be believed, the ritualized gang rape of slaves) with little popular participation and little buy in beyond the nobility. Norse paganism was hardly a core aspect of Norse "heritage" if the rapid and successful conversion to Christianity is a useful metric to go by. Indeed the religion likely varied extremely among the vast majority of the population and the paganism practiced in one part of Scandinavia likely bore little relation to that practiced in another. Evidence from across the Norse world shows that there was a great deal of variation in practices such as burial (cremation vs inhumation) and local cult popularity (as evidenced by the wide variety in theophoric place names).

The charismatic aspects of the religious tradition, veneration of Odin, ship burial/cremation, Valhalla, were probably the exclusive domain of the aristocratic elite of the Norse world. The average Norse person would not have been a participant in the same religious life as the elite of society. The average farmer, trader, slave, who lived in the Norse world almost certainly did not share the same conception of their own religious tradition as the elites of Norse society did. What good would Valhalla be to a farmer after all? Instead their worship likely focused around less well known deities with far less ostentatious displays of piety and worship.

Indeed it seems that the religion, such as it was, was incredibly tied to elite participation for legitimacy and practices. Elites in society, such as, but not limited to the King and his immediate family, were the ones who were keeping the religious practices going with ostentatious sacrifices including humans, horses, and other goods and food items and celebrated the deities and figures of the religion in their own oral traditions that would eventually be recorded by the same strata of elite members of society after conversion. They were also the ones who patronized the oral tradition of skaldic poetry that was eventually recorded by Snorri. Without elite buy in, the Norse pagan tradition could not, and eventually did not, maintain itself.

As Anders Andren says about the religion to sum up what I have covered:

Instead the religion must be regarded as a series of partly overlapping traditions, differing from place to place and from time to time, and also between different age groups, sexes, and social groups. Perhaps the shared Scandinavian features, such as boat graves and sacral place-names, should primarily be viewed as the religious expressions confined to an aristocracy with wide-ranging connections all over Scandinavia.

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Part 2: Christianity in the Early Middle Ages

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At the onset of the Viking Age, loosely defined as 800-1100, Christianity had completed its dominance of Western Europe and was starting to creep east. The former Roman lands of Italy, Gaul, Britain, and Iberia had all been converted (or reconverted in the case of England) by this time, and the Roman Emperor Charlemagne had started to spread Christianity at the tip of a sword to the Saxons, various English missionaries arrived in Germania (and Scandinavia), the Slavs were starting to convert, and the Roman church was starting to take a shape into a more familiar form to modern people.

However there were still some critical differences. Modern practices such as clerical celibacy, private confession, widespread access of communion, and so on were still some time off. However, Christianity had several things going for it at this time that made it stand out among the competing religions and traditions of early Medieval Europe, chief most among these were prestige and infrastructure.

Christianity at this point was the religion of the Roman Empire, indeed two of them. The Eastern Roman Empire had been Christian for centuries by this point, and the newly crowned Roman Emperor in Aachen, Charlemagne, made Church reform a high priority of his own. This association with the most powerful realms in Europe made Christianity appealing as a prestigious good that could be given.

One of the most important aspects of Christianity is of course baptism, and it was a powerful tool in the arsenal of conversion. Baptism, and the subsequent creation of God-Father/God-Son relationships was a powerful means of creating cohesion and loyalty in Early Medieval societies.

Christianity was also the gateway to greater trade opportunities, centralization, and infrastructure.

Trading was often restricted, or attempted at least, between Christians and non-Christians, and many luxurious trade goods such as wine and Frankish jewelry (popular in pagan Anglo-Saxon England for example) were appealing to non-Christian populations. However of more direct import especially to would be convert kings, were the benefits that Christianity brought to a ruler's administration and efforts to centralize authority. Latin literacy was a pre-requisite for the administration of medieval kingdoms (despite the presence of the vernacular in both Ecclesiastical and Secular literature in places such as England), and Latin literacy came through the Church. Furthermore a king who embraced Christianity could offer a more prestigious religion to his followers (mediated through baptism) that also brought alongside it greater connections, such as trade, to the powerful realms in Western and Southern Europe.

Finally, even at this early stage, Christianity was a more popular religion, and I mean that in the sense it appealed to the populace at large. As I pointed out above, popular participation in Norse paganism was limited, but this was not necessarily the case for Christianity. While weekly masses in the vernacular were still some ways off for the majority of the population, many parts of Western Europe were more directly engaged in religious practice (and not necessarily in a way that benefited them, I'm sure the peasants who worked on monastic land were not necessarily thrilled to be doing God's work) in a way that pagans in Scandinavia were not.

Week 136

 

At the end of July (1919 – we are getting later by the week), the slow and gradual process of transition from war to peacetime appeared underway. In Milan, the first deliveries of “live cattle from Argentina” had begun - “100 heads delivered each week”, according to the Popolo d'Italia (July 30^th 1919 – page two, Milanese news) – and it stood to reason that “fresh meat won't be scarce in the future”. In page three, anyways, Arturo Rossato - Uno qualunque - found a few reasons to complain again about the less than palatable quality of fixed price meals. The unappealing minestrina in brodo, his “yellowish cotoletta”, like “the sole of State-issued shoes”, his piece of hard cheese, like “a slab of rock from Mt. Grappa”.

They wished to go down, but I didn't feel like it. […] They threatened an assault and I promised, if you push through, I have a counterattack ready.

Good news aside, rationing was expected to “continue unchanged during the month of August”, in so far as bread, pasta and sugar were concerned. Changes had been introduced to other genera by means of “additional” cards, for the rationing of lard (two for 150g – per month), olive oil (200g), stracchino and hard cheese (100g and 100g), available upon pre-order.

Of similar urgency were the information on price regulations for fish markets (July 27^th 1919 – also page two), possibly for the upcoming week:

• | Price (Lire per Kg) --------------|----------------------- Fresh Tuna | 6.20 Trout | 9.00 Swordfish | 8.00 Albacore | 8.00 Coregone | 6.00 Eel (fat, over 700 grams) | 5.50 Eel (medium, 400 to 700 grams) | 4.50 Eel (small, less than 400 grams) | 3.00 Alosa | 4.00 Burbot | 4.00 Perch | 4.00 Tench | 3.50 Pike | 3.50 Chub | 2.50 Rudd | 2.50

 

On the center-right of the front page – still July 30^th – Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia continued to keep an eye on the Adriatic matters, while awaiting for new developments from Paris, with a reportage from Shkoder (Il possesso di Scutari - July 30^th 1919), signed by the “special correspondent” of Albanian descent Angelo Todri. The coastal city, at the front between the Italian and French-Serbian occupation zone, had been recently delivered to the French, in regime of Inter-Allied occupation, and placed under the command of gen. Joseph Bardi de Fourtou, who had previously led the French forces in northern Albania.

It's the gendarme and the informant – Todri begun after briefly reminding his readers of the state of French occupation – who administer Scutari, with a certain degree of autonomy, morally and financially satisfied, and without even suffering the risk, common in more barbaric but also more direct times, of someone shooting them in their backs. It's the very same men who, during the last ten years, have been selling their predatory skills to the Turks, Serbians, Montenegrin, Austrians and French. Their masters change, but their craft keeps selling, thanks to the generosity of the revolving governments and to the fact that the traditional systems of Istanbul and Vienna are much too strong.

Among the guards who, at every step, pompously recite their new creed: “in the name of the French general”, there are men who have on their conscience, on that alone, since the archives with criminal records were destroyed at any regime change, the most common crimes, ranging from plain theft to extortion, others who have to answer for some crime of honor, or murder. But the gendarme uniform protects them from their fall, and shines a good light on their exterior. While citizens, even the most affordable ones, are poorly dressed due to the lack of fabrics, the wardens of public order are able to parade around in the most expensive clothing, delivered from Marseille, which the municipality of Scutari, despite drowning in desperate debt, will be forced to provide for. […]

What a precarious and uncertain situation is brewing for the administration in Scutari [despite their police, and guards, and spies] – continued the article, under the subtitle “Unfortunate policy” - and what a miserable state for the population […] There is no hope, no aspirations for this people, which the infamous article of a treaty has stripped of its Homeland, bestowing it instead to the much more deserving Yugoslavia. The soldiers of the Great Republic stand here, almost as sentinels of King Peter, and enact a policy of retaliation akin to that of Alsace and Lorraine […] against a people which has nothing to share with their northern oppressors.

And after all this, they expect the Albanian people to be frank and open, to have a clear national vision, and manifest those good qualities that all sorts and kinds of governments have endeavored to frustrate. When the Balkan war broke out, the city of Scutari revolted against the rule of Nicholas II, and the European governments almost accused the people of being supporters of the Turks, and had to be asked in order for them to agree to send an international protection mission. During the European war, they again revolted, refusing to provide their assistance to the Slavs, either from Cettigne, or from Belgrade, and both Slavs and Austrians did as they pleased with the country for a few years. After such precedents, here we have a French general […] who thinks he'll be able to quickly change the face of a Country which is extremely opposed to the Slavs, either with gold, or punishment.

And in the meantime Scutari keeps the look of those houses where people walk in and out, without even bothering to leave spare change. Can the minds of the French officials really be so limited that they believe that a few months and a lot of coins may change a people's spirit and direction? They seem to have been caught by the same delusion of the recent oppressors of Alsace and Lorraine, that had come to believe [it] had become German. The citizens of Scutari are neither better nor worse than the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine, and tomorrow, when the French expedition corp sets sail for the Mediterranean, they'll remember at most that there is a great nation named France, of gaudy clothed and loud chasseurs des Alpes, and nothing else.

Doing politics with the Balkan people – the correspondent continued, under the subtitle “New policy” - means troubles, because they have proven unable to take anyone seriously.

We are way past the times when Essad Pasha, the baron Aliotti and August [von] Krall attended to their own, most extravagant, games, playing their own governments, the Albanian people, and even themselves at times, for fools. It's no longer the time of arbitrary lines cut across the Balkanic peninsula […] Delays are no longer of any use, and anyways sooner or later, someone is going to have to accept the bill, unless they want a new fire to start at the frontier. […]

Regardless of the, quite obvious, undertones of the main front page correspondence, Mussolini's newspaper continued to showcase a certain observance of the Government's concern for the excessive tone of certain “national” press. To the center-bottom of the front page, and to the side of the previous correspondence from Scutari, a brief summary informed the reader of the contents of a “long interview” released by Nitti to the correspondent of the French newspaper and published on the Matin of the previous day. There, according to the Popolo d'Italia, Nitti had “affirmed the necessity of complete unity between Italy and France, in order to constitute one block, were a new war to break out between Germany and France”.

Hon. Nitti added that there is no cause of disagreement between Italy and France and that their respective interests are nowhere in conflict.