This article examines how Kurdish Newroz has been transformed over the past century from a seasonal celebration into a repertoire for political claim-making. Drawing on a corpus of Kurdish movement publications, party materials, state documents, and press coverage spanning the late Ottoman to the contemporary period, it analyses how Newroz operates as a key site for the articulation of Kurdish collective memory and political subjectivity. Tracing the re-signification of three central symbols (the blacksmith Kawa, the ritual fire, and the contested letter ‘w’), the article shows how Newroz has been reworked as a political language through which claims to recognition, belonging, and justice are articulated. Rather than treating heritage as a fixed cultural inheritance, it approaches Newroz as a dynamic and contested process shaped by historical struggles, state interventions, and movement-led transformations. In doing so, the article argues that Kurdish Newroz functions not only as a site of cultural expression but also as a form of heritage-justice claim-making that both reflects and reshapes the politics of recognition in Turkey.