Maidan: History, Origins, Current Use and all that

From Turkish to Polish to Arabic to Hindi, the word maidan has crept into a variety of languages. Strikingly, the word has a similar meaning in all the languages that use it: square/ground. Moreover, the recent events of Tahrir Square (Mīdān at-Taḥrīr) Cairo, Egypt or on Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in Kyiv, Ukraine, have led to a common theme of ‘freedom’ for the maidans. The ubiquity of maidan leads to a curiosity of understanding the role that it plays in the foundation of ideas.

To understand maidan, the first approach would be to consider its origins. As mentioned above, the word is used in various languages to name a few: Turkish, Polish, Arabic, Ukrainian, Hindi, Persian, Serbian, and Azerbaijani. However, the word is believed to have originated from Middle Persian, which is an older form of Modern Persian. The word found its way into Arabic because of the Arab invasion of Persia in 633 AD.

During this time, certain Turkish tribes adopted the word because of their migration to the Middle East. Moreover, the large extent of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates diffused the word around their territories. The subsequent collapse of the colossal Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates allowed later empires such as the Ottoman and the Safavid Empires to flourish in their former lands. It saw the usage of the word in Turkish, and more famously in the Safavid Empire’s Maidān-e Naqsh-e Jahān, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Esfahan, Iran.

Between those times, the usage of the word in the Turkish tribes – more commonly known as the Tatars - spread maidan to Ukraine, where they also resided. Eventually, the Ukrainian lands were captured by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which imposed its own language and customs, while borrowing a few Ukrainian words, such as maidan.

Maidan’s great expedition from one language to the other has not only retained a similar pronunciation, but also a similar meaning. Moreover, expressing ideas on the maidan has been common. It has often been the piece of land where ideas were born and changes have been implemented. Tahrir Square demonstrations led to a shift in power from the former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and in Ukraine the shift in power from Viktor Yanukovych to Petro Poroshenko. Maidan has been revolutionary and imperative to many institutions in a number of countries.