The festivities, which have been mired in bloodshed in the past, led to minor incidents between police and demonstrators in a number of cities with sizeable Kurdish communities, but there were no reports of detentions.

The biggest crowd -- about 60,000 people -- gathered in Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey's Kurdish-populated southeast for the festivity organized by the country's main Kurdish movement, the Democratic Society Party (DTP).

Hundreds of police officers, backed by armoured vehicles, were on duty at the festival grounds, some five kilometres (three miles) outside the city, searching revellers before letting them in.

The DTP also appointed some 2,000 party members to help ensure that the event does not turn sour.

No incidents were reported so far from the festivities in Diyarbakir where women, dressed in bright-coloured traditional clothes, danced to Kurdish folk songs and waved flags in the Kurdish colours of red, yellow and green.

Newroz Day, which marks the arrival of spring and the Kurdish New Year, has become a platform for the Kurdish minority to demand greater freedoms or demonstrate support for the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting for self-rule in the southeast since 1984.

More than 37,000 people have been killed in the conflict with the PKK, which is blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community.

This year's Newroz Day comes three weeks after the Turkish army sent troops across the border for a week-long offensive into northern Iraq to strike at PKK bases.

The incursion ended on February 29, with a claimed toll of 240 rebels killed and army warnings over possible new offensives if need be.

Kurdish activists say the government should grant a general amnesty to PKK militants to encourage them to end their armed campaign, while the PKK has called on Ankara to engage in peace talks -- a demand the government categorically rejects.

"There can be no solution unless the guerrillas in the mountains and those in prison are back among us," Leyla Zana, a former Kurdish lawmaker who has served 10 years in prison for links with the rebels, told the crowd in Diyarbakir.

The government is not keen on a general amnesty for rebels, but Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week pledged a Kurdish-language television channel and up to 15 billion dollars (9.6 billion euros) of investment in infrastructure projects in the region.

There were minor clashes between police and militant Kurds celebrating Newroz elsewhere in Turkey.

Five people sustained minor injuries in the southeastern town of Cizre, where police dispersed a crowd shouting pro-PKK slogans, the Anatolia news agency reported.

In Yuksekova and Viransheir, also in the southeast, police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse groups of demonstrators shouting slogans in favour of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence in a Turkish jail.

Similar incidents were also reported in Turkey's biggest city Istanbul, Mersin in the south and Izmir in the west. All three cities have sizeable Kurdish communities.

Newroz is also celebrated in Iran and other Muslim communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Celebrations in Turkey have been relatively calm in recent years, but in 1992 about 50 people were killed by the security forces during clashes across the southeast.

More recently, in 2002, two men were crushed to death during a police crackdown on violent Newroz demonstrations in Mersin.