The story
Choimus Kalash Festival in Kalash Valleys
Chaumos, the most important of the Kalash people's three annual festivals, marks the winter solstice across the Kalash valleys of Chitral each December with roughly two weeks of music, dance, and ritual, closing out the year's fieldwork and harvest with sacrifice, purification rites, and communal celebration.
The Kalash, an Indo-Aryan people numbering fewer than eight thousand by recent census counts, are native to a cluster of valleys in the Chitral region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, practising a religion that blends elements of ancient Indo-Iranian, Vedic-adjacent belief with animism and ancestor veneration, distinct from the Islam practised by the great majority of their Pakistani neighbours.