Newroz Carnival Performances

The most notable of folk performance traditions of the Kurds are the ones that are performed during Newroz, the Kurdish New Year. Two important examples of these performances, which are part of the Kurdish springtime festival, are Kawey Asinger (Kawe the Blacksmith) and mîrmîran or mîrmîrên (king of kings, or playing king). While the Iranian festival of Nowruz is celebrated throughout several countries in the Middle East as the beginning of spring, what differentiates the Kurdish version of Nowruz from others is its convergence with the legend of Kawe (Kāveh in Persian), the blacksmith who rebelled against the tyranny of King Zahāk, a ruthless foreign ruler. In Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh (Book of Kings), Zahāk is possessed by two snakes growing from his shoulders that feed on the brains of two young persons every day. Zahāk’s cooks manage to rescue one person each day and send them to the mountains where they continue to live and eventually found the Kurdish nation. It is ultimately Kawe, a humble blacksmith, who rises up against Zahāk’s tyranny, using his blacksmith apron as a flag. He later joins forces with Faraydun, a person of royal descent, who leads an army under Kawe’s flag and captures Zahāk. In the Kurdish rendering of this myth, however, Faraydun is eliminated and Kawe is celebrated as a Kurdish hero who liberates the Medes, the supposed ancestors of the modern Kurds. Also, whereas in Shāhnāmeh the legend of Kawe is associated with the Mehregān festival, in the Kurdish version Kawe’s revolt is linked to the Newroz festival.

Due to its association with the story of Kawe and the victory of the oppressed against the oppressor, Newroz has accrued political significance among Kurds. The myth of Newroz and the legend of Kawe have allowed the Kurdish national movement to trace the origins of the Kurds to the ancient Medes, constructing both an ethno-genesis and a resistance myth for the Kurds.Footnote ⁹ This myth has naturally been celebrated in folk performances throughout Kurdish towns and villages during Newroz festivities. In the folk performances of this myth, the characters included King Zahāk, a few guards and councils, Kawe, the hero, three boys as Kawe’s sons, and others who played the role of townspeople.Footnote ¹⁰ The modern theatre groups have also drawn on the myth of Kawey Asinger for nationalist purposes. It was particularly utilized by Iraqi Kurdish activists in the 1970s and 1980s in order to call for revolution against the Baath dictatorship. For instance, during the four-year autonomy of the Kurdistan region in Iraq between 1970 and 1974, the story of the victory of Kawe was dramatized on Newroz by different theatre groups such as Sulaymaniyah Theatre Group and the Kurdish Arts and Literature Society.Footnote ¹¹

The Kurdish Newroz and the legend of Kawe are examples of the Kurdish myth of origin that has become a key element of the Kurdish national identity and an important factor in Kurdish nation-building projects.Footnote ¹² Celebrated by several nations throughout the Middle East, Newroz has been reconstructed by Kurdish nationalists to stand for the victory of the oppressed over the oppressor and thus symbolize the contemporary nationalist movement. What was an ancient festival has been transformed into a modern and influential ideological tool in the political arena for the identity construction of the Kurds.Footnote ¹³ The myth of Newroz and the legend of Kawe have in fact contributed significantly to the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey, where the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) intellectuals promote shared myths of common ancestry, territory, and history to counter decades of assimilationist policies pursued by Ankara.Footnote ¹⁴

Another important example of performances that form part of the Kurdish springtime festival is mîrmîran. Mîrmîran, or Mir-e Nowruzi in Persian, bears striking resemblances to the medieval Feast of Fools in which a mock king was elected to rule temporarily. According to Beyzai, Mir-e Nowruzi was a continuation of the pre-Islamic Barneshastan-e Kuseh (The Ride of the Beardless Man) festival which, by replacing the ruler with an ugly man who issued ridiculous orders, exemplified people’s disdain for the powerful.Footnote ¹⁵ In spite of its important place in Kurdish culture, Beyzai downplays the significance of this tradition by devoting only a few pages to its discussion and by writing that Mir-e Nowruzi is now only played in some “distant” villages.Footnote ¹⁶ This is despite the fact that, according to Kurdish sources, mîrmîran, also referred to as paşapaşayetî, was the single most important theatrical event among the Kurds until at least the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁷ On the centrality of this festival to the Kurdish performance tradition, it may suffice to say that Gîw Mukriyanî, the Kurdish historian, journalist, and researcher, has used the term mîrmîrên as the Kurdish equivalent to the word theatre in English and masrah in Arabic.Footnote ¹⁸

Mîrmîran was enacted in Kurdish regions of Iraq and Iran during Newroz at the beginning of spring. In the nineteenth century, each Kurdish area was governed by a ruler. During mîrmîran this ruler was temporarily replaced by an ordinary, sometimes even ridiculous person, chosen from the people of that area to perform in this play, the props of which were provided by the people themselves. The lords and nobility would lend the new king their lavish clothes, accessories, horses, boots, swords, and other valuables.Footnote ¹⁹ It was customary for the substitute ruler to have some witty and jovial people as his helpers. In this play, there are character types known to the people—the grand vizier, the right and left vizier, secretary, soldiers, executioners, chorus, clown, and so on. According to Ashurpur, the right-hand vizier was in charge of giving reasonable orders, while the left-hand vizier executed unreasonable and ludicrous orders. For example, the right-hand vizier would declare on behalf of the king that innocent prisoners must be freed, families who were not on good terms had to reconcile, the rich had to pay their due zakat to the poor, and everyone had to clean the front of their houses. The left-hand vizier, on the other hand, would give absurd orders such as every man has to shave half of his moustache, all young boys over the age of thirteen have to get married by tomorrow, all city-dwellers have to move to the countryside and the country dwellers have to move to the city.Footnote ²⁰

In his History of Theatre in Iran, Floor states that this festival of “false emir” was a three-day festival which was most recently celebrated in the 1890s in the springtime in the Kurdish town of Mahabad.Footnote ²¹ However, different sources give different figures for the length of the festival, which, according to some, ran for the entire thirteen days of the holiday season.Footnote ²² According to Pîrbal, the false emir festival started five days before Newroz and ended on the thirteenth day of the new year.Footnote ²³ As for the coronation of the mock king, it seems, at least in Sulaymaniyah, that the event would take no more than three days. Tenya, for example, writes that in 1912 in Sulaymaniyah, a witty mullah called Mela Biçkol was chosen as king and his coronation was a joyous three-day-long festive occasion.Footnote ²⁴ He further explains that during this festival it was customary that the elders of Sulaymaniyah would take control of the city and all their orders would be implemented. This was an occasion for three days of festivities, which started from the city centre where people would dance to the sound of dihol and zurna for two days. Later, the people would all walk towards Sarchinar, near Sulaymaniyah, where fifty springs form a stream that runs through the city. There the king would sit on the throne and various sorts of games would start with the royal accord. The festivities would end with the people’s joyful return to the city to the accompaniment of music.Footnote ²⁵

In Sulaymaniyah, open-air amusements and celebrations were always popular,Footnote ²⁶ and traditional festivals such as mîrmîran enjoyed the support of Kurdish rulers and were only interrupted by important events such as the death of Şêx Seîd Berzencî, the highest religious authority in the region. His death brought a halt to celebrations, storytelling and gramophones at teahouses, but after the due period of grieving over his death, the carnivals and celebrations were resumed.Footnote ²⁷ A relatively well-documented instance of the false emir festival in the city of Sulaymaniyah dates back to the 1920s. Here is how Thomas Bois (1900‒1975), the French orientalist, describes this “carnival” based on Tewfiq Wehbi’s account of its performance:

It is important to note that the Kurdish false king, as confirmed in the above quote, possessed genuine power despite his name, and his rule was respected by local rulers. Edmonds writes that in Sulaymaniyah he was, “often regaled with stories of an annual spring carnival of ancient origin, a kind of saturnalia, which had fallen into desuetude either during or only shortly before the [First World] War.”Footnote ²⁹ During Newroz, Edmonds says, “the whole population of Sulaymaniyah would flock out to the Sarchinar springs for a festival which involved the appointment of a Lord of Misrule with very real powers, the temporary upsetting of many of the canons of ordinary behaviour, and the almost complete suspension of normal administration.”Footnote ³⁰ This upsetting of official hierarchy of power and norms of behavior was sanctioned by the highest authority of the Sulaymaniyah region—the Baban pashas—until the mid-nineteenth century and after that by Şêx Mehmûd Berzencî, who not only licensed the festival, but also took part in it. Every year in Sulaymaniyah, Şêx Mehmûd himself would give the order to start the festivities and would respect the new king like everybody else.Footnote ³¹ The nobility would also lend the king their valuables, as demonstrated in the case of Ferec Kurdî, a local comic figure and a mock king in the 1920s who wore the clothes given to him by Mistefa Paşa Yamulkî (1866‒1936), the Ottoman military officer and later minister of education in Şêx Mehmûd Berzencî’s self-proclaimed Kingdom of Kurdistan.Footnote ³²

The licensing of the festival by local rulers legitimized the whole representation, wherein the hierarchy of the official order was overturned. This is similar to the sort of performance Terry Eagleton describes as “a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art.”Footnote ³³ The subversive play of the carnival consists of temporarily suspending the hierarchical power structure inherent in the practice of everyday life. It proves the importance of such representation, wherein the ruler sees himself reflected through the mirrors of carnivalesque representation. In her review of a similar African performance, Plastow notes that this type of performance presumably was not only cathartic for the participants but also created an acceptable conduit for public opinion to be passed on to higher authorities.Footnote ³⁴

Ewrehman Xame was the last king of this festival in Sulaymaniyah, which ended in 1922 after the British officials banned it altogether. According to Hewramî, in an interview Xame stressed that his rule was not an act and it was only called a game to fool the British colonizers.Footnote ³⁵ In fact, the mock king had almost absolute power and his rule was approved by the governor of Sulaymaniyah in the 1920s, Enwer Begî Tewfîq Beg, in all but two things: freeing slaves and killing people. However, it did not take long for the British officers to sense the seriousness of the mock king’s rule and put an end to it. It is also possible that the arrest of two Englishmen provoked the British rulers. According to Hewramî, after two Englishmen laughed at the spectacle they were arrested and only freed after they paid compensation for their disregard of Xame’s rule.Footnote ³⁶ It is also reported that a British political officer to Kurdistan, Major E. B. Soane, was once allegedly charged 500 rupees for drinking.Footnote ³⁷ To mock the king and his authority or to ignore his orders was punishable regardless of the offender’s rank. This might have angered the colonizers of the land, who could not tolerate punishment at the hands of the natives. According to Fetah, the British colonizers who watched the festival games and performances from a distance on horseback disapproved of the representation of a king in those performances and as such banned them not only in Sulaymaniyah but in all Kurdish regions. However, this was not the end of the false emir festival. Between 1927 and 1930, in Qeladze, north of Sulaymaniyah, the festival was held and a Bekir Qesab ruled for forty days before his rule was forcefully terminated.Footnote ³⁸

As Amine and Carlson suggest, the banning of local festivals by the European colonizers could be due to their carnivalesque and satiric nature. According to them, the Europeans, with their culturally conditioned idea of theatre, based upon the European tradition, viewed these activities as, at best, quaint local customs unworthy of the name of art, and at worst as “perverse and unpatriotic locations for the expression of subversive and anti-colonial expression.”Footnote ³⁹ Thus, the official colonial attitude towards such performance traditions was either to ignore or, as in the case of the Kurdish false emir carnival, to outlaw them.

Barneshastane Kuseh

According to Beyzai, the festival of Barneshastane Kuseh was an ancient Iranian tradition held on 21 November, which was considered the last day of winter in ancient Iran.Footnote ⁴⁰ The performance involved a beardless man (kuseh) riding on a donkey with a crow in one hand and a fan in the other, pretending to be hot. The crowds would throw snowballs at him and, at the same time, would bestow him with gifts. Those who gave no donations were splashed with mud by the beardless man. Beyzai associates this tradition with the religious festival of ʿOmar kosh ā n (the killing of ʿOmar) among the Iranian Shiites which celebrates the killing of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattāb, the second caliph of Islam, and involves the burning of his effigy. Beyzai writes that the kuseh tradition survived centuries after Islam as the mir-e nowruzi festival which, like its predecessor, served to display people’s hatred towards the king.Footnote ⁴¹

Kose-geldî, which was practiced in Iranian towns and villages until recently, has also been described in Iranian sources as the shepherds’ celebration of the end of the first forty days of winter. Playing musical instruments, ringing bells, and singing songs, a group of shepherds would boisterously pass through the alleyways and streets performing the roles of Kose, Kose’s bride, and goats. Kose would wear a long inside-out robe covered with small bells. The person playing the role of Kose would paint his face white and wear a mask made of goat skin with eye and breathing holes. He would also wear a big leather belt and hold a big stick to represent shepherds. The person playing the role of Kose’s bride was usually chosen from among teenage boys aged between twelve and sixteen. The bride would wear women’s dress (sometimes a colorful chador) and heavy makeup and would tie bells around his waist and hands. Kose, his bride, and the goats, accompanied by musicians, would knock on people’s doors to wish them abundance, wealth, and God’s blessing. They would perform different plots at their hosts’ homes, where they would receive money and gifts especially from the nobility and the rich.Footnote ⁴²

Salimi, in his book on Kurdish winter rituals, describes several instances of Kose-geldî in different towns and villages of Iranian Kurdistan.Footnote ⁴³ According to Salimi, Kose is mainly a comic figure who entertains the village people with his make-up, costume, dance, and humor.Footnote ⁴⁴ But on some occasions the village youth change the Kose tradition by turning Kose into a scary figure, usually with the help of fake moustache, beard, and large fur coat. Then they hide themselves while Kose knocks on people’s doors and frightens those unfamiliar with the tradition.Footnote ⁴⁵

In villages of Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan, the shepherds hold a Kose-Kose celebration in which some of the shepherds and herdsmen are made up in the mosque’s çeqexane (a little room by the side of the main hall). Kose’s make-up and costume is meant to make him look frightening. Accompanied by the youth and children of the village, he starts walking through the streets and knocks on people’s doors. A series of questions and answers are exchanged between Kose and the landlord such as:

Here, the shepherd who is standing behind Kose sings comic folkloric songs while Kose makes funny gestures, about which the crowd starts to laugh. The shepherd sings:

An early account of Kose-geldî in Kurdistan, however, points to a serious purpose behind this tradition among the Kurds. Bois gives an account of a popular midwinter festival witnessed by Ereb Çemo (1897‒1979) when he was a child. In this festival, which he calls Kose-geldî, “a young man is disguised as a sheik or mullah while another is dressed up as a woman. The two then go from house to house collecting butter, cheese and money … Everything which has been collected in this manner by the young men is distributed to poor families.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Therefore, while Kose’s witticism and horseplay is the main characteristic of this tradition, Kose-geldî is not just entertainment. Rather, by obliging the wealthy farmers to share their wealth with the poor shepherds, Kose-geldî is a reminder of communal values of caring for each other on New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, contrary to Beyzai’s claim that Barneshastan-e Kuseh symbolizes people’s dislike of kings and is related to the Shiite tradition of ʿOmar kosh ā n and the festival of mir-e nowruzi, in the Sunni Kurdish regions of Iran, Kose-Kose and mîrmîran represent two distinct traditions which existed and survived alongside each other well into the twentieth century.

Rain Rituals

Kurdish rituals such as those of garwanekî (cattle-raid) and bûke-barane (rain bride) are highly performative and theatrical in nature. Garwanekî is a cattle-raid ritual which used to be performed in many villages of Kermanshah, Ilam and also Lorestan (western Iran).Footnote ⁴⁷ This ritual, which went out of practice only fifty years ago, was performed by women during drought to invoke rain. Garwanekî, also known as gorwatenî, gaberan, gareba, gabrwa, or gayl rifanin, literally means stealing cows. This ritual was performed mainly by women in spring and autumn in case of drought or late rainfall. When there was a delay in the onset of rain, women and girls of the village would gather together to arrange the ritual. They would elect a leader among themselves and move to the pastures where cattle belonging to the neighboring village were grazing. They would drive the cattle to their own village and if the cowhands or farmers working around that area intervened they would be beaten by the women. On hearing the news, the women and girls of the village to which the cattle belonged would immediately set off to fight the cow-thieves and take the cattle back. The collector of the ritual suggests that in any case the cow-stealers would ultimately win because they would be better prepared for the fight.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, one might doubt the seriousness of the fight and want to measure the theatrical nature of the ritual. Unfortunately the information existing about this ritual was collected only after it became extinct, which makes a careful observation of it out of the question. In any case, when the victorious group entered their village with the stolen cattle, the celebration would start in the village. The cows would be milked and the milk would then be boiled, mixed with tea, and served to all. A pot of milk would also be poured down the rainspouts to create the illusion of rain. In the meantime, the elders of the neighboring village would come to plead for the release of the cattle. After successfully persuading the women to return the cattle, they would all stand to pray for rain and the ritual would end with the return of the cows to the neighboring village.

Bûke-barane is another Kurdish rain ritual which used to be performed by young girls in Kurdistan at times of drought. In this ritual, young girls would surround a wooden doll dressed in a Kurdish woman’s costume and sing songs asking her to make rain. In some versions of the event, children would take the wooden doll door-to-door and people would respond by pouring water over it.Footnote ⁴⁹ Some of the songs sung during the ritual went like this:

Or,

The association of women with water is seen in another rain ritual which, however, is not particular just to Kurds as it has been seen to have taken place in other Iranian towns as well.Footnote ⁵⁰ This ritual is characterized by marrying girls to lakes that were drying up. It is recorded by the Kurdish-Iranian writer, Ali-Ashraf Darvishian in his autobiographical novel, Sāl-hā-ye Abri (Cloudy Years). In the novel we read about Nazke, an old woman who was wedded to a lake when it was about to dry. Nazke narrates,

Taʿziyeh, Religion, and Kurdish Lamentation

The tradition of taʿziyeh, a text-based religious drama performed by the Shiites in Iran, has been celebrated by scholars as an important and distinct Iranian performance tradition, with origins in the ancient Iranian tradition of Sug-e Siyāvash (Mourning Siyāvash).Footnote ⁵² In Ferdowsi’s epic, Shāhnāmeh, Siyāvash is a splendidly handsome and honorable prince who, betrayed by his family, is forced into self-imposed exile in the mythical land of Turān where he meets an unjust death. The news of Siyāvash’s death in exile prompts outbursts of grief and anger in Iran for many years to come. According to the tenth century historian, Narshakhi (ca. 899–959), Siyāvash had been mourned in Central Asia for thousands of years:

Like taʿziyeh, Kurdish funeral rites contain traces of Sug-e Siyāvash which, as described in Shāhnāmeh, involved crying, scratching, and injuring the body, mourners throwing earth on their heads, women pulling or chopping off their hair, cutting off the tail of the deceased’s horse, wailing, describing the good features and traits of the deceased, singing and playing musical instruments. This tradition is more elaborate among the Lor and the Lek (mainly in the Iranian provinces of Ilam, Lorestan, and Kermanshah), whose tradition of çemerî or çemere bears striking resemblances to the ancient mourning ritual.Footnote ⁵⁴ An account by Claudius Rich (1787‒1821), who was in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1820, attests to the deep roots of the çemerî tradition among the Kurds:

Another Kurdish mourning ritual that may have roots in the ancient Sug-e Siyāvash is kotel, which was usually performed on the occasion of the death of heads of families and ashirats.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this ritual, a caparisoned horse with the deceased’s guns and other important belongings placed on it was walked around in a circle or towards where the corpse was placed. In çemerî, this is accompanied by the mournful singing of women and the playing of zurna. Today at typical Kurdish funerals the rites are not as elaborate as in çemerî, which itself is losing popularity among the Lor and the Lek. However, crying, injuring the body, women pulling at their hair, and lamentation are still considered social duties by many. Kurdish lamentation is performed by women who may or may not be related to the deceased. They usually sing about the deceased and his good features and traits, coaxing the funeral attendants to cry. Such ritual mourning services serve as a valuable mechanism for remembering the deceased and purging the grief.

Despite the highly dramatic nature of Kurdish mourning rituals, they are rarely discussed in studies of Iranian performance traditions, which focus on taʿziyeh, another derivation of Sug-e Siyāvash. Furthermore, the fact that taʿziyeh, as a religious drama, has survived in Iran despite the conservative Islamic restrictions on music has also fascinated scholars such as Beeman, who describes taʿziyeh as the most prominent approved form of musical performance in the Persianate world.Footnote ⁵⁷ In a chapter that deals with approved forms of performance in the Persianate world, Beeman only makes a passing remark about the function of music in Kurdish religious ceremonies.Footnote ⁵⁸ This is unfortunate given the fact that, as Beeman himself notes, music is central to the numerous mystical sects that exist among the Kurds.Footnote ⁵⁹

Unlike in taʿziyeh, in which music does not accompany the singing, in Kurdish sufi ceremonies the participants engage in a type of dance, or sema, which consists of moving the body backward and forward, and is performed in a state of trance accompanied by the rhythmic sound of def, songs, and saying of dhikr. These spiritual Sufi ceremonies are performed in khanaqahs in two separate rooms, one for male def players, singers, and participants, and the other for their female counterparts. Followers of tariqa may hold mewlûdî to celebrate the Prophet Mohammad’s birth at their homes, with sema being an essential part of it. Among the Kurdish Ahl-i Haqq, the music, while not a necessary part of religious ceremonies, is performed to enhance and elevate the spiritual atmosphere.Footnote ⁶⁰ This is similar to the Yezidi recitation of religious texts to the accompaniment of music.Footnote ⁶¹

Storytelling

Dramatic storytelling is a common tradition across most countries in the Middle East. It may be considered a native theatrical tradition of the region and in form lies closest to Western-style theatre.Footnote ⁶² The storyteller is known by names such as qawwal, gouwâl, meddah and, more commonly, hakawati in Arabic, aşik in Turkish and naqqāl in Persian. According to Amine and Carlson, although storytelling is not text-based, it clearly contains many features of drama including role-playing, epic narrativity, body language, interplay between illusion and reality, high/low rhythms, songs as instruments of blockage, structural fragmentation, and a committed audience.Footnote ⁶³ Friederike Pannewick’s description of narrative characteristics of hakawati, as quoted by Amine and Carlson, demonstrates its animating quality, as the hakawati has to take into account that his clientele will desert him if his performance does not meet their expectations. Thus, he has to design his narrative performance in such a way that he can prevent his audience from losing interest by increasing the dramatic tension whenever necessary.Footnote ⁶⁴

In Kurdistan, the narrator-performers who present long epic songs without musical accompaniment before a live audience are known as dengbêj, or şair.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the past, because most of the dengbêjs were illiterate and a large proportion of Kurdish folk literature still unwritten, these performers specialized in memorizing and reciting vast repertoires of songs, legends, and poems of Kurdistan. Trained in certain schools,Footnote ⁶⁶ the dengbêjs used to have patrons who supported and took care of them and were, in return, praised in their dengbêjs’ songs. On the Kurdish dengbêj in the first decade of the twentieth century, Oscar Mann writes:

The storytellers would employ a range of dramatic techniques such as gestures and different voices for different characters. For example, in his study of voice and the speed of verbal discourse during the storytelling of Mem û Zîn, Chyet writes:

Traditionally in the Middle East, storytelling was highly interactive, as audiences were encouraged to comment upon or even participate in the presentation of the story, which was interrupted from time to time in order for the performers to collect donations from the spectators. The material in such performances varied from legends to folktales, to history to popular anecdotes.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Kurdistan, apart from countless folktales, folk songs, folk dances, poems, riddles, and proverbs, there are a number of widely known folk romances told in a combination of prose and sung verse. Some of these narratives, including Leylî û Mecnûn and Yusuf û Zilêxa, are also shared by neighboring peoples such as the Armenian, Nestorian, Chaldean, and Jacobite Christians, as well as by the Kurdish Jews. There are also long Kurdish narratives, such as Mem û Zîn, Dimdim, and Xec û Siyabend.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Kurdish tradition therefore lies in the middle of a much wider one, without which the full story cannot be told.

Storytelling has been the most common and popular form of performance in many parts of Kurdistan. Many of the Kurdish emirs and feudal landlords were patrons of the arts, hosted performances of both literary and oral material, and had their own court poets sing their praises, as befitted their status.Footnote ⁷¹ Şukriye Resûl, for example, states that the court of Ewrehman Paşa, one of the greatest rulers of the Baban principality, was always well attended by the beytbêj, singers and poets such as Elî Berdeşanî, Cemşîd, and Heme Asmanî, whose poems, known as beytî meclîs, recorded the events and epic battles fought by the Kurdish prince.Footnote ⁷²

The best season for storytelling was long winter evenings and the holy month of Ramadan, just after the breaking of fast when the local people would gather in coffeehouses. The stories told and enacted by the storyteller were mainly folktales and histories of local heroes. A popular saying among Kurdish Jews is, “Two things are necessary in winter, fire and folktale; fire to warm the body and folktale to warm the heart.”Footnote ⁷³ In Iranian Kurdistan, reading stories from Ferdowsi’s epic Shāhnāmeh was so popular that each great family in Kermanshah had their own Shāhnāmeh-khān. Many verses of Shāhnāmeh stories told by Kurdish storytellers, according to Floor, were translated into Kurdish.Footnote ⁷⁴ Izedîn Mistefa Resûl recounts how during the nights of Ramadan, the storytellers would narrate stories about the heroes of Shāhnāmeh such as Rustemî Zal and Zorab in the big coffeehouses of the Kurdish cities.Footnote ⁷⁵ He describes how the performers were able to completely engage their audiences, who would divide into separate groups that cheered for different characters and grieved for their demise.Footnote ⁷⁶

In Kurdistan, the performers of prose narratives are called çîrokbêj. The çîrokbêj were usually itinerant performers who wandered on foot from city to city, selecting public places to present their tales, with a strong theatrical element including improvised dramatic action, impersonation, singing, and dancing, usually accompanied by a tambourine and flute. Such performers enjoyed lower prestige than the dengbêj and, like the aşik, seem to have disappeared.Footnote ⁷⁷

Perhaps the most prestigious and popular oral genre in Kurdistan is poetry. The long narrative poems are called beyt in Sorani and qewl, or hozan, in Kurmanji.Footnote ⁷⁸ Some beyts are about the history of a region and important events in the lives of the noble families who ruled the region. These are told by the beytbêj, who are considered to be local historians. They recount the glories of the past and so imbue their people with a sense of local pride and unity. However, praise-poem and heroic recitations were used in particular to honor the nobility who were patrons of local poets and artists. Every great house in Kurdistan had its own poet who would narrate their oral history. The beytbêj would sometimes narrate romantic epics or historical narratives in public places such as mosques and tea-houses. Between 1901 and 1903, and in collaboration with Javad Qazi, the German Kurdologist Oskar Mann collected nineteen beyts as told by a local beytbêj named Rehman Bekir in Mahabad, and along with six Kurdish legends published them in a book called Die Mundart der Mukri. Footnote ⁷⁹

The tradition of Kurdish storytelling has been the subject of a few academic studies that all contribute to a better understanding of how power relations and everyday politics are articulated through, and played out in, cultural productions and via cultural activism. Hamelink, for example, investigates the lives and songs of dengbêjs to understand the socio-political transformations that Kurdish society in Turkey went through over recent decades.Footnote ⁸⁰ Likewise, Metin Yüksel’s thesis delineates the dengbêj tradition as one of the important means for the dissemination of Kurdish culture, history and memories in the public sphere through generations, and in the preservation of Kurdish identity and cultural forms.Footnote ⁸¹ According to Yüksel, the Turkish state’s denial of Kurdish identity, language, and culture has reinforced the already existing and strong Kurdish oral culture that has come to be the only communication channel, instrument, and/or means through which Kurds could have expressed themselves. The importance of the dengbêj tradition as a medium of expression is confirmed by Aras, who has examined the role of oral narrative genres of lament, and dengbêj performance as the medium of traumatized people in the Kurdish community to speak about, share, and disseminate stories of their experiences of enduring pain and suffering.Footnote ⁸² He also shows how the dengbêj tradition became a politicized narrative genre and performance through which performers criticized and attacked the Turkish state policies by glorifying the Kurdish revolts and praising leaders of the revolts, Kurdish history, culture, and language.Footnote ⁸³ Scalbert-Yücel has also analyzed the reconstruction of the tradition of dengbêj in Diyarbakir partly due to its selection and revitalization by Kurdish nationalists as part of the process of building a distinct national culture and “construction of a specifically Kurdish tradition.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Among the Kurds, storytelling has played an important role in the preservation of Kurdish culture, history, and memories, and their dissemination in the public sphere. Not only that, in Turkey it has been used as a form of resistance against the state and to make calls for revolution. By concentrating on the experiences and perspectives of ordinary Kurds, previous studies of dengbêj highlight the agency of the non-elite Kurds and place particular emphasis on Kurdish culture as an important terrain for retrieving marginalized voices of dissent. It is especially important to locate and retrieve these voices in the case of the Kurds because academics and historians of the Middle East tend to focus on the region’s major powers to the exclusion of the marginalized Kurds, whose “version of, or role in history is not really covered” in mainstream histories, to the detriment of understanding the history and culture of the region in the process.Footnote ⁸⁵