There are two religious holidays or feasts, the first is Seker Bayrami (3 days) which comes immediately after 30 days of fasting in the Ramadan and the second is Kurban Bayrami (4 days) which follows 70 days after Seker Bayrami. In Turkish, Bayram is "feast" or "holiday", seker is "sweets" and kurban is a "sacrifice".
The dates of religious holidays come 10 days earlier each year because of the difference between the Lunar Year (354 days) and the Solar Year (365 days). Although not all the people in Anatolia are religious, these religious feasts are very traditional and have become essential. People make lots of preparations in celebration of these feasts like cleaning houses, shopping, buying feast gifts, new clothes, sending greeting cards and so forth.
On the first day of the feast, very early in the morning, people get up, wash themselves, wear fragrance or cologne and put on their new clothes. The majority of the male population go to mosques for the early morning prayer which is extremely important. School aged children are also taken to mosques by their fathers or older relatives in order to make them acquire the habit of going to prayers. So many people go to mosques that they do not fit inside or even in the courtyard. When this is the case, they take small carpets from home to mosques, put them in the streets near the mosque and join in with the service. The Imams give sermons as this is an opportunity to preach to so many people together. The dominant subject these days is peace, and they always try to encourage brotherhood and general goodwill among all. After prayers in the mosque everybody gives feast greeting to each other by shaking hands. The next stage is at home where feast greetings continue. In the traditional extended families these greetings do not take too much time as all members are at the same place. But in nuclear families it might take a much longer time.
Kurban Bayrami is the same as Seker Bayrami