By Vladimir van Wilgenburg
Turkish nationalists constantly say there is no Kurdistan, but the Turkish traveller #Evliya Çelebi# travelled extensively in Kurdistan. In his ten thick volumes of his Book of Travels (Seyahatname) constitute a unique work almost unparalleled in the travel literature.
This doesn’t only describe Kurdistan, but many more nations and countries including my own. This traveler is hailed as one of the most prominent examples of Turkish literature in that Evliya Celebi has fully employed his skill in using Ottoman Turkish. He also appears on several Turkish government sites with an gov.tr extension, but they write that he described “Anatolia”, not Kurdistan.
The Dutch independent famous social anthropologist and an expert on Kurds Martin van Bruinessen (Whom I am going to interview soon) wrote about Evliya Çelebi and shows that the Turks in the past didn’t deny that there was a “Kurdistan”, but off course then there was no reason then to deny the existence of a region called Kurdistan, because Turkey didn’t exist at that moment.
In the article “Kurdistan in the 16th and 17th centuries, as reflected in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname”, The Journal of Kurdish Studies 3 (2000), Martin van Bruinessen wrote something interesting about Kurdistan.
The famous Ottoman traveller and writer Evliya Çelebi (1611- ..) travelled regularly by horse.
I will quote:
In official Ottoman parlance, Kurdistan was the name of a province (eyalet), an administrative unit. For Evliya, the term refers primarily to the Kurds as an ethnic category, irrespective of political and administrative boundaries. He uses it in a number of different ways. Once he describes an inhospitable region as Kürdistan ve Türkmenistan ve sengistan, which perhaps is best translated as a land of Kurds and Turcomans and rocks, and in which one perceives something of the educated urban dweller's disdain for rough and frightening rural folk. In other passages, however, it is clear that he has a definite geographical region in mind:
It is a vast territory: from its northern extreme in Erzurum it stretches by Van, Hakkari, Cizre, `Amadiya, Mosul, Shahrazur, Harir and Ardalan to Baghdad, Darna, Dartang and even as far as Basra: seventy day's journeys of rocky Kurdistan. If the six thousand Kurdish tribes and clans in these high mountains would not constitute a firm barrier between Arab Iraq (sic!) and the Ottomans, it would be an easy matter for the Persians to invade Asia Minor (diyar-i Rum). (...) Kurdistan is not as wide as it is long. From Harir and Ardalan on the Persian frontier in the east to Damascus and Aleppo [in the west], its width varies from twenty-five to fifteen day's journeys. In these vast territories live five hundred thousand musket-bearing Shafi`i Muslims. And there are 776 fortresses, all of them intact.
The fact that Kurdistan exists was reminded again by a college I attended on the University of Leiden. In this college my professor of “Old History” said that Kurdistan was the land, that used to be inhabited by Assyrians. Nowadays Assyrian cities like Hakkari are totally filled with Kurds. In fact the city is named after Kurds.
Also a book which was part of the curriculum of General Contemporary History in university called A History of Western Society,by J.P. McKay – B.D. Hill – J. Buckler, also showed that Kurdistan exits in one of the pictures of maps of the Ottoman empire.
I want to remind my Turkish readers, that Kurdistan doesn’t officially exist as a country in your Turkish schoolbooks and maps, but it still exists in the hearts of many Kurds, old history maps, geography books, texts and it’s also recognised that it exists by professors, etc. You can shout what you want, but the reality is there.
Vladimir van Wilgenburg is a Student/Journalist from Netherlands.[1]