Kurdish Heritage Reclaimed

Excerpt

In the breathtakingly rugged Turkish province of Hakkari, pristine rivers surge through spectacular mountain gorges and partridges feed beneath tall clusters of white hollyhock. I’m attending the marriage celebration of 24-year-old Baris and his 21-year-old bride, Dilan, in the Kurdish heartland near the borders of Syria, Iran and Iraq. This is not the actual wedding; the civil and religious ceremonies were performed earlier in the week. Not until after this party, though, will the couple spend their first night together as husband and wife. It will be a short celebration by Kurdish standards—barely 36 hours.

Quotes

Highlights

• “The Kurds expected a sort of joint government, with the ability to control their own region, but that didn’t happen at all,” says Aliza Marcus, author of Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. “The state did everything it could to get rid of the Kurdish nation. By the late 1930s, Kurdish resistance was more or less crushed. But the Kurdish spirit was never wiped out.”

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