Chilla in Afghanistan: the forty days of deepest winter

Photo: Haroon Safi

The dates

Shab-e Chella, the longest night, is the last night of autumn: 30 Qaws, which is 21 December 2026 (see Shab-e Chella). The chilla starts the next day.

• Big chilla: forty days and nights from 1 Jadi 1405 (22 December 2026). Jadi has 30 days, so the fortieth day is 10 Dalw (30 January 2027).
• Small chilla: twenty days, 11 to 30 Dalw 1405 (31 January to 19 February 2027).
• 1 Hut 1405 is 20 February 2027. Writers say that with Hut a new page of winter turns, the ground warms and the hard frosts end.

Sources do not agree to the day. One Afghan writer says the small chilla begins "with Dalw"; another gives only "about" the start of Dalw. The forty-day count above is simple arithmetic from 1 Jadi. Check any year on the date converter or the Afghan calendar.

Older people sometimes count winter as eighty days, from 1 Jadi to 20 Hut. Kabul Press says winter was longer in the past, and that after the climate changed the second chilla came to be counted as twenty days and twenty nights.

Big and small

The small chilla is the one people fear. Kabul Press calls it the "wrath of winter": the season shows its last strength and is then beaten. The last day of the small chilla is called shast o shikast, "sixty and break", because the sixty days from 1 Jadi are over and winter breaks. Wikipedia describes the same split of forty plus twenty days, which it says is also kept in Iran.

A folk tale told in Hazara villages has the small chilla meet the big one and say that it has done nothing, so it will freeze children in the cradle, women's hands in the water jar and men's feet to the ground. The big chilla answers that its own life is short, and spring is behind it.

The toghol

Hazara villagers also reckon the cold by toghol, short spells of snow, wind and cold, counted down through the winter: seven toghols from 1 Qaws, five from 1 Jadi, three from 1 Dalw and one in Hut. A toghol lasts five to seven days. Kabul Press says people once thought it a bad omen to travel then. After a toghol, farmers spread soil or ash on their fields so that the snow would melt early and the land would be bare by Nowruz.

This is a tradition of village life, mostly described among Hazara communities. Practice differs from valley to valley, and no forecast comes from it. For the real weather, use the weather page.

What people did

Kabul Press writes that in most Hazara areas a "landi" sheep was slaughtered a few days before the chilla, and its meat was used through the forty days. On the morning the chilla began, the mouth of the flour bin was opened. On chilla nights people gathered in the warmest house, called a tokhana or tabkhana, to tell stories and folk tales. For the foods of the season, see Afghan winter foods.

How cold it really is

The chilla matches the weather. By the Open-Meteo averages for 2011 to 2025 in our winter piece, Kabul's January nights average about 8 degrees below zero, with frost on about 97 percent of nights.

Photo: Todd Huffman from Phoenix, AZ · CC BY 2.0

Heaters, braziers and the sandali kill people in closed rooms every winter. Read how to keep warm safely before the cold comes, and keep a window open a little. For poisoning, call 102.