September, In Pursuit of Kurdistan

It’s taken until now—in the wind chill of late October—for me to come to terms with the fact that it’s not summer anymore. I’m usually not subject to delusions about when one season ends and another begins—we have solstices and equinoxes to make easy work of that—but for the first time in 22 years, I haven’t had the familiar sights and scents of fall in the American Northeast to rouse me out of wishful thinking.
After two decades of Septembers spent enacting the same routine, I didn’t come back to school with this one (I graduated). Instead, with a friend in tow, I shipped off to Turkey, spending the fall equinox and the following week and a half in Kurdistan before turning back around to move into my room in Istanbul.
For many American armchair geostrategists/cultural anthropologists, Kurdistan occupies a distant, exalted space in the imagination, falling somewhere along the continuum of rugged, ethnically diverse mountainous places between Bosnia and Bhutan and spanning the eternally unquiet borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. If you decide to indulge your curiosity, you won’t find any hostels or Western backpackers in Kurdistan (Turkey’s slice, to say nothing of the others), despite Lonely Planet’s fairly detailed entries for every major city—and you’ll be glad not to. For all its fierce, unkempt stock imagery, Kurdistan is slow-paced and easy to settle into. But don’t say I didn’t warn you: the place isn’t without its challenges. Keep your eyes open.
First of all, finding Kurdistan itself requires more effort than you might think. The sprawling region, which stretches from the Euphrates Valley up to the steepest mountains of the Zagros range, has no designated borders or distinctive, unifying geography. Absent the apparatus of a nation-state, Kurdistan is simply where the Kurds live, and despite Turkish efforts over the decades to write off the predominant ethnic group of the east as “mountain Turks,” Kurdistan has only grown larger, at the expense of Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, and Arab concentrations.
Given that above all, Kurds are defined by their language (well, group of closely-related languages, but I won’t get pedantic), an Indo-European relative of Persian and Pashto, looking and listening for something other than Turkish should do the trick, right? Only somewhat. Turkish being the sole official language of state, all Kurds are educated in Turkish—and most wouldn’t think to speak anything other than Turkish, let alone English, to an outsider. And wherever you are, the majority of signs and displays, targeting a national market, will be in Turkish. Had you come to Turkish Kurdistan 20 or 30 years ago, you’d have had to work even harder—until quite recently, public use of the Kurdish language, in signage, broadcast, and even public gatherings, was deemed illegal and enforced against, especially in the heavily Turkified major cities of the east.

Our first awareness that we were on the fringe of Kurdistan came through physiognomy and softer cultural cues: on the road from Adana to Gaziantep, parallel to the Syrian border, people began to look more and more un-Turkish. At a rest stop, we noticed Turks on one side of a cafeteria, speaking Turkish; Syrians, on the other, speaking Arabic; and manning the tea and coffee, a darker-skinned crew speaking what sounded not too different from Persian. Through some mutual verbal fumbling over tea, we taught each other words of English and Kurdish, respectively, and established a rapport by flashing the Kurdish-flag icon of my English-Kurdish iPhone app and allowing the guys to trace an irredentist outline of Kurdistan on our Lonely Planet map of the region. But even they admitted we were not quite yet in Kurdistan.
As we rolled into Gaziantep (“victorious Antep”, so renamed by parliamentary decree for its resistance against the French during the Turkish War of Independence), the most distinctive elements we noticed were the ubiquitous pistachio baklava shops and life-saving Arabic-speaking Syrian refugees—Kurdish faces here and there, but nothing to suggest we were any closer to Kurdistan than to Syria. Rejoicing in WiFi after stumbling into a cheap hotel at 1 a.m. (at this point, there are no longer any hostels in the major cities), I zipped to Antep’s Wikipedia entry and learned of its reputation as “the last Turkish city of the east.”
Excited to hit the first Kurdish city of the east, Sanliurfa (“honorable Urfa”, known almost exclusively by its pre-political name), we darted out of Antep and crossed the Euphrates into the golden hills of Upper Mesopotamia—hardly the archetypal picture of rugged Kurdistan. There, among swells of Arab and Iranian religious tourists visiting the charming garden compound of mosques containing the fabled birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, we found picture-perfect panoramas, gemlike architecture, kiwi smoothies, and a diverse local populace of Syrians, Turks, and Kurds, but no clear signs of Kurdistan. The signs blared Turkish and (for me, comforting) Arabic; the ambience, helped by nearby early Neolithic ruins, was of Mesopotamia.

The clean break into Kurdistan finally happened somewhere along the road northeast from Urfa to Diyarbakir, the sprawling de facto capital of Turkish Kurdistan. Here, on the banks of the northern Tigris, we finally started to see Kurdish signage, food advertised as Kurdish, and street vendors hawking low-quality jerseys for a would-be Kurdish national football team. Though nearly all places in Turkey are ethnically mixed below the surface, Diyarbakir gives not the slightest impression of a mixed city: when my Arabic finally became of use with a group of young locals on the ramparts of the city’s massive basalt walls, they let me know immediately that though Syrian, they were Syrian Kurds.
Meanwhile, both Western and regional tourism are virtually non-existent, owing to Diyarbakir’s reputation as the home of violent street battles between Turkish forces and the radical Kurdish nationalist PKK, and its considerable distance from any of Turkey’s tourism hubs. This is a crying shame. Fitted with decent amenities, cheap markets, and a welter of starkly beautiful basalt-brick churches, mosques, caravanserais, and city ramparts, Diyarbakir is probably the most undervalued city in all of Turkey — vibrant despite a century of violent attempts at cultural eradication.
And don’t even get me started on the people: though people across Turkey, and particular its Kurdish regions, are preternaturally warm by Western standards, Diyarbakir locals take the cake. Time and again, zealous Diyarbakir residents with no verbal means of getting across to us saved our skins and built tremendous rapport over the language barrier through flirtation (those Indo-Iranian eyes!) and punchy ethno-national humor (“I thought you were Syrians: Americans are much taller!”). But the best came when fluent language contact finally did come at the dengbej house, a municipality-sponsored base for the traditional historico-poetic bards of Kurdistan.
As we entered the compound, whose configuration reminded me of a Beijing hutong, but ringed with basalt and limestone colonnades, the dengbej house’s big man—a PR type bearing an odd resemblance to Benjamin Netanyahu—rushed to warmly greet us. Clearly a veteran of the Kurdish nationalist movement, he explained to us in perfectly weighted English, honed in Queens and Manhattan, that Kurds in Turkey today have abandoned the struggle for territorial independence in favor of full cultural autonomy and civil rights. The dengbej, he regretted to inform us, would not be performing this afternoon, out of respect for the Kurdish war dead in Sinjar and Kobane—and would be spending the next few weeks in conclave, making epic, sung history out of the Kurdish front of the current ISIS conflict in Iraq and Syria. As for us, he queried, looking deep into our eyes through a film of tears: Were we Jewish? When we answered yes, he was stunned but not altogether surprised—another Turkish Kurdish friend seemed to have magically divined our ethnicity a week before—and welled up, promising, “We, the Kurds, will change the Middle East for you. It is disgusting that you have to hide who you are.” After more exchanges of mutual solidarity, we packed up, but not before a series of deep embraces and photo ops with the regulars. “Your blood is warm to us,” exclaimed one in Kurdish, as we shuffled into place for a picture under basalt arches.

The eastward ascent to Van, which I’ll remember for my friend’s sudden outburst of food poisoning, only complicated matters: though I knew we were still in Kurdish-majority territory, the shadow of Armenia—whose historic core had always included Lake Van and its environs—loomed large, giving the feeling of a new land entirely. An ancient city with roots as the 2,800-year-old capital of Urartu, Van had been razed at the end of World War I in clashes between the Turks and the Russians, and rebuilt soon after, in a drab modernist grid set several kilometers back from the lake’s shore. The result: far eastern Turkey’s most modern and secular city, a far cry from either Urfa or Diyarbakir. After circling the lake and surveying the region’s highlights—the tenth-century Armenian cathedral on Akhtamar Island, the reddish-brown stone monuments of Ahlat, and the snowy 13-er heights of Suphan Dag in the backwoods of Adilcevaz, I settled back in Van before my flight—only finally made aware of the city’s overwhelming Kurdish character through the Kurdish-language protest signs calling attention to Sinjar and Kobane’s tragedies, and some bilingual inscriptions on a large public park’s trash cans.

I didn’t realize that upon returning to Istanbul, a city whose non-Turkish roots are generally to be sought to the west, that I wouldn’t be leaving Kurdistan any time soon. That is, I moved into a house in the once-Greek, now largely Kurdish (and more recently, Syrian) refugee slum of Tarlabasi, a warm, lively place whose mere mention strikes fear in the hearts of secular middle-class Istanbullus. On October 6, my fifth night in Istanbul, the ISIS advance on Kobane, a Syrian Kurdish enclave directly adjacent to the border with Turkey, reached a breaking point, and Kurds across Turkey, starting in my neighborhood of Istanbul, took to the streets in violent protest. What began as a silent activist vigil on Istiklal Street crescendoed into several nights of light armed struggle in Tarlabasi and downtown Istanbul, as well as violent, lethal confrontation across all the cities my friend and I had visited less than two weeks before. All in all, 40 were killed in the worst outbreak of Turkish-Kurdish violence in years—jeopardizing the fragile accord between the Turkish government and the PKK, and calling to global attention the distance between the U.S.-led coalition’s anti-ISIS mission and the Turkish Islamist government’s fundamentally different goals in Syria. My neighborhood, which I’ve since discovered to be full of warm people of a dizzying array of backgrounds—Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Nigerians, Erasmus students—has fallen back into its usual routine of suspicious vans, daily drug deals, hooker-john encounters on the corner, and late-night teahouse football-watching, without a trace of the riots that swept through here earlier this month and threatened to burst down my front door.
But I highly doubt this is the end of the story—whether or not Kobane falls, the situation of the Kurds in Turkey, a prodigiously large minority numbering anywhere between 15 and 20 million and dominating large swaths of the east, is anything but resolved. If history is any guide, the cities I visited and fell in love with will be visited with much more bloodshed in the years to come for as long as the many-sided border conflict roils on, not just between Turkish forces and Kurdish protestors, but also between Kurdish nationalists and Kurdish Islamists, Turkish nationalists and Syrian refugees, and between ISIS—rampant in Antep and Urfa—and nationalists of all stripes. I highly recommend that you take advantage of the lull, fly to Turkey, take heart, and get off the beaten path for an immersive experience in the multiethnic, naturally breathtaking, profoundly ancient landscape known in some circles as Kurdistan.
Image credits: Josh Lipson/HPR