Thousands of people in Frankfurt celebrated the Kurdish New Year festival Newroz in bright sunshine on Saturday.

The police reported around 15,000 visitors.

It was the central Newroz celebration in Germany, so participants traveled from all over Germany, many of them in buses.

A police spokesman spoke of a peaceful course.

Numerous people waved flags in green, red, yellow and white or were dressed in these colors of Kurdistan.

A few flags with a picture of the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan could also be seen.

In one case, a drone carrying a flag crashed, and no one was injured, a police spokesman said.

The flag with a motif of the banned workers' party PKK was seized.

Among the speakers at the major event on the central stage on the Rebstock site near the exhibition center were representatives of various civil society associations and organizations, representatives of the pro-Kurdish HDP party and Gerhard Trabert, a social medicine doctor from Mainz and former federal presidential candidate.

There was also live music and dancing between and in dozens of tents.

Newroz is always celebrated around the moment when day and night are of equal length.