hidden europe 7 / march 2006

�

feature

protected by the

Germanyphotos by Karlos Zurutuza

estern Union o!ices the world over have a certain similarity. The West-ern Union Telegraph Company was

born one hundred and Qfty years ago this year. In 1856 no-one imagined that this messaging system, which did so much to speed communi-cations across frontier America, might become a lifeline for the dispossessed and hungry, those who urgently await their remittances from afar. Dinero en Minutos reads the sign nailed to the side of the o!ice by the bus stop in a nonde-script wayside town in northern Mexico. ‘Money

Win minutes’, at least for those blessed by a be-nevolent friend or relation in a far Rung land.

The Western Union o!ice at Hannover’s main railway station may have a dose of Ger-man neon, but its social demeanour is more Mexican desert than intercity elegance. Two men, the ones stranded on the hard shoulder of life’s highway, interrogate their mobile phones and the impassive counter clerk about the remit-tances they are expecting. At the adjacent desk, there is one with money. A small roll of cash is handed over to the girl behind the screen. She

peacock angel

text by hidden europe

source: hidden europe 7 (March 2006)text © 2006 Nicky SC Gardner, Gardner & Kries GbRphotos © 2006 Karlos Zurutuzawww.hiddeneurope.co.uk

hidden europe 7 / march 2006

�

opposite: during summer, many Armenian Yezidis spend time on the higher pastures (yailas), using old Soviet army tents for shelter; above: young Yezidi girls on the yailas below Mt. Aragats (photos by Karlos Zurutuza)

counts the money twice, examining each piece of paper with evident curiosity. It is as if she has never seen a ten euro banknote before. The inspection done, she looks up and remarks: “So just ninety euros then?”

The slight young man leans forward and says, sort of apologetically, “Yes. Just ninety. Back to Armenia.” There is discussion of code numbers and passwords, the desk clerk passes over a slip to the attentive Armenian who leaves the Western Union o!ice.

On the slow train back to Celle — the local train is cheaper than the express — Temur ex-

plains that he is Armenian but with a di!erence. “Yezidi,” he says.

“So Kurdish?” I ask hesitantly.“Well, yes and no,” he adds in a manner

that suggests he’s done this a thousand times before. “We speak a very similar language to all other Kurds… some call it Kurmanji, some call it Yezidi or Kurdish. But our religion, well that’s completely di!erent.”

Celle, a half hour north of Hannover on the slow train, is one of those unexceptional mid-sized towns that are so common in western Ger-many. It is bourgeois, amiable and full of timber framed houses. It is the sort of place where glüh-wein is served in cafés with lace curtains from the Qrst hint of autumn right through to spring,

and where the houses sport unsettling antique inscriptions like ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away’. It seems the sort of place where Temur might not readily Qt in, were it not for the fact that Celle is home to some three thou-sand Yezidis. Some come from eastern Turkey, others from Armenia, yet others from Georgia, Iran or northern Iraq.

To get to know Temur, it is essential to play backgammon. In a room lit only by the most meagre of light bulbs, several games of back-gammon are underway. Amid mu#ed talk of pips, points and blots there is some bemoan-

ing of how much Western Union now charges to send money back home. Slender triangles on the backgammon board delimit the Qeld of play. Some of the players, all men, drink tea. There are just two women, and they sit apart, on a rug at the other end of the room from the backgam-mon players.

On the wall above the backgammon tourna-ment, there is a quite startling picture, di!icult to fathom in the ill-lit room. Neither ziggurats nor minarets, the three gold conic cupolas on

hidden europe 7 / march 2006

�

a young Yezidi on a donkey; bareback simplicity is the norm (photo by Karlos Zurutuza)

Armenia

the picture mimic the geometry of the backgam-mon board. “That’s Lalish,” explains Temur. “For us, it is the most sacred place in the world. It’s in Iraq.”

Across the room there hangs a picture of grassy slopes on the edge of a great mountain, remnants of winter snow lingering high above an encampment of what look like army tents. “Mount Aragats in Armenia,” says one of the two women who sit on the Roor, as she o!ers me a saucer with a little cheese and Rat bread on it. The cheese is soft and briny, di!icult to eat with any delicacy, a little like a very sticky mozzarella. “Chechil cheese and lavash bread” says the wom-an with a toothy grin. All the men have pictures — of parents, of children in brightly coloured clothes, and of big tents in the wilderness.

I knew very little of Yezidi ways — some vague memories of the peacock god, of people who often live in old Soviet army tents oppor-tunely secured from the Russians at a time when

Moscow’s ability to hold sway over the Caucasus region was fatally undermined, and half remem-bered notions of bitter disputes between the Yez-idis and Muslim Kurds. Celle seems an improb-able outpost of the Yezidi diaspora, and Temur is a little unsure about quite why so many Yezidis have ended up in this small town. “So what’s it like to live here?” I ask, anxious that my ques-tion might be too direct for comfort.

“It is very much like home,” says Temur thoughtfully, “If there’s a problem in the town, a robbery perhaps or a Qght, then everyone blames us Qrst. They don’t trust us, and we live on the edge of things. We keep ourselves to our-selves and don’t mix at all. It is…” He pauses for a moment. “It is exactly like Armenia.”

he villages around Mount Aragats are certainly on the edge of things. They may be less than an hour’s drive from

the Armenian capital Yerevan, but it is another world. The bureaucrats who populate the great government buildings around Yerevan’s Repub-lic Square know or care little about the Yezidis. Nor do the tourists who barter at the capital’s Vernissage market on the weekends, anxious to strike the best possible deals on rugs, wooden carvings and embroidery.

Yerevan is an Armenia with which most of the Yezidis have little contact, so there is at least a reciprocity in ignorance. The government may proclaim the country’s ethnic homogeneity, and certainly Armenia does have, on the face of it, less variety than many other former Soviet re-publics. But that is to overlook the little enclaves of ethnic or confessional resilience that have survived. People like the Armenian Tats, most of whom live at Nor Madrasa near Ashtarak (also on the route out from Yerevan to Mount Ara-gats). Or the cabbage growing Molokans at Fio-letovo, a deeply conservative group of Russian speaking Christians. The communally minded Molokans eschew technology and lead lives of the utmost simplicity — Armenia’s answer to the Amish perhaps!

T

hidden europe 7 / march 2006

5

above: Sheikhan, on the way to Lalish, a Yezidi village with the characteristic Yezidi conical temple; below: a Yezidi couple in Lalish (photos by Karlos Zurutuza)

Elsewhere in Armenia, as throughout the Transcaucasian region, there are little known but intriguing minorities: Assyrians, Greeks and Ukrainians among others. The political tur-moil of the nineties, as Armenia tussled with neighbouring Azerbaijan over the governance of Nagorno Karabagh led to large numbers of Azeris and Kurds leaving Armenia. But although some Yezidis left for Russia or Germany, most of the population remained in its traditional mountain homelands of Armenia, and nowa-days the Yezidis number among the country’s most populous minorities — one that is rarely seen, and which, like the Yezidis in Celle, keeps a remarkably low proQle. Armenia is still home to over �0,000 Yezidis.

The Yezidi people are principally pastoral-ists. In winter they spend time in the villages that cluster around the lower slopes of Mount Aragats, a four thousand metre high peak that is all too often confused with the even higher Mount Ararat that lies just a hundred kilome-tres away to the south in neighbouring Turkey. In summer, the Yezidis take to the hills, and that’s where those old Soviet army tents come in handy. A large extended family may share a tent, encamped on one of the high mountain pastures, which are called yailas. Some travel on foot, others ride bareback on donkeys and hors-es. Even up in the yailas, the tents have a picture or two of Lalish, and a corner is always reserved for the pile of sacred silks.

Down in Yerevan’s Republic Square there is much talk in the cafés of one country, one people, one language. And some more entrepre-neurially minded bureaucrats are Roating the idea of privatising land. Up in the Yezidi villages there is considerable apprehension that their very identity is under threat, and that changes in land ownership may limit the Yezidis’ freedom to roam summer pastures.

The Yezidis’ religious life is one of the most remarkable and ill understood of any in the Eurasian region. The nucleus of their faith may well have been in one of the Islamic SuQ brotherhoods that Rourished in Mesopotamia

hidden europe 7 / march 2006

6

san

ctua

ry o

f Sh

eikh

Adi

according to Yezidi mythology, the little community of Lalish in northern Iraq is the very throne of God. It is, they say, a place that was once in the heavens, but then placed upon earth. This green valley is the focal point for all Yezidis — the people who live under the protection of the great peacock angel (photo by Karlos Zurutuza)

context

hidden europe is grateful to Karlos Zurutuza for his excellent photographs to illustrate this article. But we are indebted to him for much more besides: for it was Karlos who, through his regular e-mails to us when he visited Armenia and Lalish last summer, Qrst inspired us to go on the trail of the Yezidis. Karlos is a photographer who lives in San Sebastián in Euskal Herria (the Basque Country).

in the twelfth century. But there the link with Islam ends, for modern Yezidi beliefs are a curi-ous mixture drawn from Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian traditions. The dominant symbol is the peacock angel, whom the Yezidis call Melek Taus, and religious fervour reaches its apotheosis in the Lalish valley in northern Iraq, where lies the sanctuary and tomb of Sheikh Adi, who gets the credit for giving deQnition to Yezidi customs and beliefs in his Jelwa (Book of Revelation). For Armenian Yezidis, as for others of their faith, the mark of a good summer on the high yailas is that it concludes with a pilgrimage in mid October to Lalish. There, around the shrine with its distinc-tive gold conic cupolas, Qve days are dedicated to ritual festivities at the centre of which lie the various acts of homage to the divine peacock. It is perhaps no surprise that when Gertrude Bell set out from Jerusalem one hundred years ago to explore this part of the world where Europe and Asia interQnger, one of her friends in Jerusalem is said to have remarked of the Yezidis: “Ah, yes, the ones who worship a giant buzzard.”

isunderstanding over Yezidi religious beliefs — they have often been dis-missed as devil worshippers — has

prompted the Yezidi practice of keeping apart from mainstream society. The deeply secretive Yezidis play little role in the civic governance of the places they call home. But there is one remarkable exception. In last year’s European elections, an energetic thirty year old Yezidi woman, born in Celle in Germany, was elected to the Strasbourg parliament. Feleknas Uca is a member of Germany’s Party of Democratic So-cialism (PDS), now part of Die Linke alliance. More on her at www.feleknasuca.de.

Mpolitics

hidden europe 7 / march 2006

7

The underground Kurdish village to which Gertrude Bell alludes is almost certainly Ishkaftad, which in early 1909 was the home of the notorious Hassan Jangir.

above: the black snake at the entrance to Sheikh Adi’s shrine (photo by Karlos Zurutuza); below: Yezidi home-lands: Lalish is close to Al Mawşil (Mosul) in northern Iraq (map © Collins Bartholomew Ltd; scale 1:5,500,000)

To the Shrine of Sheikh Adi in Lalish

Friday 7 May 1909

Gertrude Bell

hen he gave me two guides and I rode with them and my four soldiers into the mountains to see the shrine of Sheikh Adi, which is the Yezidi holy place. The reason I have four soldiers is that these mountains are very much disturbed,

owing to the constant raids of the nomad Kurds. Two days ago an outlying Kurdish village of underground caves was stormed by soldiers, several people killed and others taken and sent as prisoners to Mosul (Mawşil, Al). We rode for two hours up into the rocky hills and in and out over the folds of them, between oak trees and bushes of Rowering hawthorn, and at last we dropped down into a deep valley, at the head of which, embosomed in mulberry and Qg, is the tiny village and the shrine of Sheikh Adi. Ali Beg’s sister received and welcomed me and led me through the outer courts to the shrine. As she stood at the door in her long white robes and white veil she looked like some strange priestess; she kissed the door posts and murmured a prayer to Sheikh Adi before we entered. By the door a great snake is carved in relief upon the wall and painted black so that it catches your eye the moment you enter the peaceful little court. But I asked no questions. So we went into the shrine which was like a church with two aisles and no nave; and then she took me into a high chamber, pitch dark, in which stands the tomb of Sheikh Adi — I lighted it up with magnesian wire while she murmured prayers. Then we went into some underground chambers, through which a stream Rows from basin to basin, passing through the wall of one room into another and Qnally out into a little court behind the sanctuary. The water Rowed indiscriminately over the Roor of the chamber and I took o! my stockings — my boots I had already taken o! when I entered the shrine — and paddled about over sharp pebbles following my priestess with her oil lamp. She turned to me in the middle and said “Aren’t you afraid? I am afraid.” But I wasn’t, probably because I did not know how holy it all was. She was very anxious to kill a lamb and make me a feast, but I succeeded in dissuading her and we compromised by my accepting bowls of milk and piles of bread which my guides and I shared between us. So we rode back over the mountains and got into camp at six o’clock.

Gertrude Bell is one of the most remarkable of early women travel writers. She was born in County Durham in northeast England in 1868, and became one of the foremost explorers of her day. Her travels through the country of the Yezidis and on through Mesopotamia are recorded in Qne detail in her letters and diaries, which are archived at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. More details on www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk.

T