Kurdish History Journal
Articles filed under Kurdish History and Resilience.
Taq-e Bostan near Kermanshah brings together an open-air relief, two carved iwans and hunting scenes. Inscriptions and scholarly debates help distinguish what the monuments say from later identifications.
Read article →Bisotun (Behistun), the ancient cliff in Kurdish Kermanshah bearing Darius the Great’s inscription — the trilingual text that became the key to deciphering cuneiform, and a UNESCO site.
Read article →The Mudhafaria Minaret (Choli Minaret), Erbil’s great 12th-century brick tower from the age of Gökböri — the city’s most important medieval monument after the Citadel.
Read article →Zrêbar, also recorded as Zarivar and Zirewar, is a freshwater wetland beside Marivan in Iran’s Kurdistan Province. Its springs, reed beds, local livelihoods and ancient sediments make it a significant landscape in the Kurdish Zagros.
Read article →Lice (Licê), a Kurdish mountain town in north-eastern Diyarbakır Province — marked by the devastating 1975 earthquake and a notable place in the modern history of the southeast.
Read article →The Munzur Valley (Geliyê Mizûr), the sacred river gorge and national park of Dersim in Tunceli Province — a landscape of great beauty holy to the Alevi people.
Read article →Pertek’s island castle and two relocated mosques preserve different parts of an older river settlement. Archaeological research and conservation records explain how the Keban reservoir transformed this landscape in the Dersim region.
Read article →Near Takab in northwestern Iran, Takht-e Soleyman brings together a spring-fed lake, Sasanian religious architecture and an Ilkhanid palace. Excavations explain how these different layers developed.
Read article →Palu (Palû), the ancient Kurdish citadel town on the Murat river in Elazığ Province — a place of Urartian inscriptions and a heartland of the 1925 Sheikh Said uprising.
Read article →Lake Dukan is the reservoir formed by a dam on the Lesser Zab in Sulaymaniyah Governorate. Its history includes twentieth-century engineering, the flooding of older settlements on the Rania Plain and continuing archaeological work shaped by the lake’s changing water levels.
Read article →Gercüş is both a town and a district in Batman province, north of the Mardin–Midyat uplands. Its history includes changing administrative boundaries, Kurdish language and local scholarship, vineyard renewal and Syriac Christian sites in surrounding villages.
Read article →Midyat stands within Tur Abdin’s limestone landscape in Mardin province. Its history connects Syriac religious institutions, Kurdish and Arabic-speaking neighbours, twentieth-century violence, continuing manuscript work and telkari silver craftsmanship.
Read article →Sason is a mountain district of Batman Province in southeastern Turkey. Its history brings together Kurdish and Arabic-speaking communities, Armenian cultural memory, and repeated episodes of violence and forced migration.
Read article →Hilvan’s history can be traced through local settlement accounts, the 1926 district law, archaeological inventories and the changing Euphrates landscape.
Read article →Suruç (Pirsûs), a Kurdish town on the Şanlıurfa border plain facing Kobani — a refuge during the battle for Kobani and a town that has known both solidarity and sorrow.
Read article →Tuz Khurmatu’s Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab communities have experienced changing political control, attacks and prolonged displacement. Its history is clearer when the constitutional dispute, documented episodes of violence and conditions for return are examined separately.
Read article →Adıyaman (Semsûr), a Kurdish-populated city in south-eastern Turkey near the Commagene monument of Mount Nemrut — an ancient land devastated by the 2023 earthquake.
Read article →Kurtalan, known in Kurdish as Misircê, is a town and district centre in Siirt Province. Its history connects the changing administration of Garzan, the arrival of the railway in 1944 and a wider landscape where archaeological research documents settlement long before the modern station.
Read article →Tillo’s scholarly history connects İsmail Fakirullah, İbrahim Hakkı, manuscripts and a carefully aligned light mechanism. Its official name was restored in 2013, while its proposed UNESCO heritage status remains a Tentative List entry.
Read article →Hajij is a village in Paveh County, Kermanshah Province, known for its stepped housing. Architectural fieldwork explains how its houses respond to sloping ground and household privacy, while research on tourism and the Sirwan valley records a landscape undergoing change.
Read article →Bismil, a Kurdish town on the Tigris in the fertile plain of Diyarbakır Province — a major farming centre in the ancient heartland of the upper Tigris basin.
Read article →Şemdinli, also known as Şemzînan or Shamdinan, is a town and district in Hakkari Province near Turkey’s borders with Iran and Iraq. Its history includes the Nehri sheikhs, Christian communities, stone-built routes and the 2005 Umut bookshop bombing.
Read article →Dêralok is a river town in Duhok Governorate’s Amedi district. Local studies and project records provide a more concrete picture of its waterways, ecology and changing electricity infrastructure than a general description of mountain scenery.
Read article →Sahneh, east of Kermanshah on the road toward Hamadan, is associated with a distinctive tanbur tradition. Field research, recording notes and the Darband rock tomb offer specific ways to explore its cultural landscape.
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