Pittsburghers of all faiths gather to break the Ramadan fast at iftar

This year, Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, encompassed the start of spring. In Pittsburgh, that meant the holiday’s dawn-to-dusk 12-hour fast grew even longer part way through with the arrival of daylight savings time, but Serap Uzonoglu says she’s grateful for it — in warmer weather, you can gather outside, pushing tables together so the whole neighborhood can come and break bread.

In another celestial rarity, in 2025, Ramadan also overlaps Lent and ends shortly before Passover.

The interfaith convergence is nothing new for Uzonoglu and the Turkish Cultural Center of Pittsburgh, where Uzonoglu, an ESL teacher from Turkey and refugee case worker, also serves as a board member and organizes community outreach. During Ramadan, the Center travels around the region holding iftar dinners, the meal eaten after dusk to break the Ramadan fast, with an aim of building community and sharing traditions.

Last year, the Turkish Cultural Center hosted a landmark iftar with Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey at its location in Green Tree. This year, with a theme of “Ramadan: A Unifying Tradition of Reflection and Community,” iftar came for the first time to Pittsburgh’s City-County Building, hosted in partnership with City Councilors Theresa Kail-Smith and Erica Strassburger.

At St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mt. Lebanon, the interfaith ties are longstanding. After frying up fish for the Church’s Friday Lenten fish fry, 150 community members returned on a Sunday to break bread at St. Paul’s fourth iftar dinner, an interfaith event Rev. Noah Evans described as “very much a part of the fabric of our life here.”

When the partnership with the Turkish Cultural Center first began, Rev. Evans tells Pittsburgh City Paper, “I went to more iftars than fish fries.”

“I think that what we’re doing here is a sign of the arc of the universe bending towards justice, as Martin Luther King said,” Evans says. “There’s so much that focuses on the divisions of our world right now, how people are not able to get along, how people are at war, how cultures and religions are in conflict. And instead, we’re saying that we can come together.”

In addition to its public Ramadan events, the Turkish Cultural Center also invited Pittsburghers to join for more personal home-based iftar dinners held at the homes of Turkish families. Similar to the approach at the City-County Building, home dinners are hosted in the spirit of “celebrat[ing] our shared values while also promoting diversity and unity within our community,” the organization wrote.

Anyone is welcome to come and break bread, and City Paper joined for a women’s cross-cultural iftar dinner at a home in Green Tree.

Though welcoming strangers into your home for 30 days might seem strange to Americans, Uzunoglu calls it “the soul of Ramadan.”

“During Ramadan [in Turkey], people are always opening their doors,” she tells CP. “And if they see any hungry people, they are just sharing their food. This is what Ramadan means.”

Esra Sahin, who immigrated to Pittsburgh from Nigeria with her husband three years ago, confirms the communal feeling was the same there, and it builds quickly.

“It’s not strange for me to meet other people in the house or in the church or in other places,” Sahin says. “Maybe [if] you join for our second program or second dinner, [it] will not be strange.”

In a nod to the holiday’s open-hearted spirit, most of the iftar dinner’s eight Turkish and American guests were already well-acquainted, mostly through Uzunoglu.

“Serap [Uzunoglu] knows everything,” Jan Littrell of Dormont tells CP.

Linda Brown met Uzunoglu, who also works full-time as a caseworker for the resettlement agency Jewish Family and Community Services, when Uzunoglu was trying to find space where a group of refugee women from Turkey could work on embroidery. Uzunoglu already led a support a group at St. Paul’s, and the women began meeting in the church’s lounge on Wednesdays with help from Brown, a member of the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh.

“They were showing us some stitches, and they showed us how to make embroidery. Later, when we made panels, we started selling them,” Uzunoglu says.

The partnership led to an exhibition at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in fall 2023, and a showing at Studio Forget-Me-Not in Carnegie where the women sold their work.

“Since then, we are friends, and [they] continue supporting us,” Uzunoglu tells CP. “So we are always gathering when we have special events, and we are hosting them. They are hosting us.”

Their get-togethers include a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, with Uzunoglu commenting that in comparison to Turkish meals, “It’s nice, of course. Not that much [variety], but still.”

Brown joined for the iftar meal along with Littrell, a St. Paul’s church member. Littrell bought her friend Gail Hodgins to experience her first iftar dinner.

Asked what she expected, Hodgins says, “Lots of good food.”

“That’s what I told her: the food’s to die for,” Littrell says.

During Ramadan, the daily fast is broken at sunset — in Pittsburgh, now close to 7:40 p.m. — and usually begins with eating dates. Our dinner also included a light lentil soup, which was also a hit at St. Paul’s, along with a spread of grape leaves, beet salad, green beans, manti (a Turkish dumpling), and samsa, a meat-filled pastry (that can also be found at some of Pittsburgh’s Uzbek restaurants).

Ramadan is also a time for heightened spiritual devotion, and dinner is followed by a prayer.

“It’s kind of an excit[ing] time for us, waiting for after the iftar, [because] we are ready to join the prayer,” says Sahin, after which some recite the Quran, the holy book, for hours. “So it’s really [exciting].”

Sahin explains that over the 30-day period, Muslims aim to finish reading the entire text, and some people read it twice.

“We try hard every year,” she tells CP.

One of the core teachings of Ramadan, Uzunoglu says, is that “fasting is empathy.” Empathy can’t be achieved without actually walking in another’s shoes and abstaining from food, Uzunoglu says. While fasting for Ramadan, observant Muslims even forgo drinking water.

“We are always saying that, ‘Oh, I understand,” Uzunoglu says. “But if you don’t really do it, it is hard to exactly understand. But you feel how they suffer.”

“It’s a means of spiritual purification,” she says.

Editor’s note: On repeated requests from multiple sources citing safety concerns, CP has agreed to remove “political” quotes used in an earlier version of this story.

This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.