Photo: Füsun Kavrakoğlu, Karaites Ethnographical Exhibition, Trakai, Lithuania, 2026.
Karaims have a separate lunar calendar to designate the annual holidays. The year consist of 354 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes. The calendar is divided into a 19-year cycle (Lunar Circle) with 12 regular and 7 leap years with an additional 13 month. A month has 29 (partial month) or 30 (full month) days. Karaims celebrate Saturday, the day of the new moon (the first day of each month).
The most popular Karaim dishes are kybyn and kiubetien and traditional liqueur krupnikas. The thick meaty soup of long, thin sheets tutmatch is an everyday dish. Lamb is popular. Small, round buns from unleavened dough tymbyl are baked for festivals. Baking them is a kind of ritual for the whole family. Katlama, a curd cake with seven layers. Wedding cakes are of two sorts – round and oblong. Round one is baked at the groom’s house, the oblong at the bride’s.
The traditional dress of Karaim women consists of a velvet unbuttoned jacket with wide sleeves up to the elbows (kyrcha) and a flat round velvet hat decorated with a necklace or coins, a kaftan type dress, a light, bright scarf or a loose-fitting attached to a hat. Kyrcha is a must: From red, maroon, brown, green or blue velvet, embroidered with gold or silver threads.
Man’s main piece was a striped robe, girded with a belt or scarf, and a rather tall, truncated cone-shaped, dark red hat with a tassel – the fez.
The Karaim ornamentation of Lithuania shows the influence of Western European culture, while the Crimean Karaims – the influence of Muslim culture.
Kenesas, Halina Kobeckaité, Vilnius, 2019.
Information panels of Karaites Ethnographical Exhibition, Trakai, Lithuania.
For further reading
Fred Astren, Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (2004)
Meira Polliack (ed.), Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources (Brill, 2003)
And the papers of Dan Shapira, Mikhail Kizilov, Henryk Jankowski are very important to understand the Karaims.
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