Ten Kurdish People You Didn't Know Are Kurdish
- Jamal Latif
- Jun 20
- 9 min read
Introduction
Some of the most recognisable names in music, cinema, sport, science, and business carry a Kurdish heritage that almost never makes it onto the marquee. For more than a century, Kurds living under Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian rule were pressured — sometimes by law, sometimes by stigma — to present themselves as something else. Many of the people below became household names as “Turkish,” “Iranian,” “German,” or “Russian” stars while their Kurdish roots stayed quietly in the background.
This is a look at ten famous figures whose Kurdish identity is real and well documented, even if you never knew it. We have deliberately left out the Kurds everyone already recognises — Saladin, the Barzanis, the singer Şivan Perwer — because the point here is the surprise. We have also left out names that circulate online but do not hold up under scrutiny.
Key Takeaways
Kurdish heritage runs through global pop culture, elite sport, and big business — often hidden behind a “Turkish” or “Iranian” public image.
Decades of assimilation policy, statelessness, and censorship pushed many Kurds to downplay their identity, especially in Turkey.
This list spans the major Kurdish regions and the diaspora: Bakur (Turkey), Rojhilat (Iran), and communities in Germany, the United States, and the former Soviet Union.
Some figures, such as İbrahim Tatlıses and Ahmet Kaya, are of mixed heritage; we flag that honestly rather than overclaiming.
Not everyone rumoured to be Kurdish actually is — Nobel laureate Aziz Sancar, for example, identifies firmly as Turkish.
Contents
Why So Many Kurds Stayed Hidden
Kurds are often called the world’s largest people without a state, divided across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In several of those countries, open Kurdish identity has been politically risky for generations. The early Turkish republic treated Kurds as “Mountain Turks,” restricted the Kurdish language in public life for decades, and made Kurdish political expression dangerous. Performers, athletes, and entrepreneurs who wanted national success often worked in Turkish and kept their background private.
The pressures differed in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, but the pattern was similar: the surest route to a national audience usually ran through the majority language and culture. So when a globally famous “Turkish” singer turns out to speak Kurdish as a first language, it is less a personal secret than a measure of how thoroughly Kurdish identity was pushed to the margins. The figures below reflect that history — some embraced their roots loudly, others kept them quiet, and a few paid a real price for speaking up.
1. Hamdi Ulukaya — the billionaire behind Chobani
Chobani turned thick, strained yogurt into an American staple, and the man behind it is one of the United States’ best-known immigrant entrepreneurs. Hamdi Ulukaya was born in 1972 into a Kurdish dairy-farming family in eastern Turkey and grew up in a semi-nomadic, sheep-herding world — the same tradition of yogurt and cheese-making that later became his business model.
Ulukaya has been open that he left Turkey partly because of the state’s treatment of its Kurdish minority, and he describes himself as a Kurd and an advocate for Kurdish rights. After arriving in the US in the 1990s, he bought a defunct yogurt plant in upstate New York in 2005 and built Chobani into a billion-dollar brand. He later handed employees a slice of the company and became a leading advocate for hiring refugees.
2. Deniz Undav — Germany’s Bundesliga striker
A forward for VfB Stuttgart and the Germany national team, Deniz Undav grew up near Bremen and broke through after years in the lower leagues. His family are Kurdish Yazidis from the village of Işıklı near Viranşehir in southeastern Turkey; his grandfather emigrated to Germany after the 1980 military coup, when many Yazidis were leaving the region.
Eligible to play for either Germany or Turkey, Undav chose Germany — a decision widely linked in Kurdish and Turkish media to his Kurdish background. When he discussed it publicly, he pointedly invoked the words “unity, justice and freedom.” He is the first footballer of Yazidi heritage to represent Germany at a major tournament. (The Yazidis are an ethno-religious community rooted in the Kurdish-speaking world, and Undav’s family is part of it.)
3. Yılmaz Güney — the Palme d’Or-winning director
Yılmaz Güney (1937–1984) is one of the most important filmmakers the Middle East has produced. He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982 for Yol, which he wrote from a prison cell while a collaborator, Şerif Gören, directed it on his instructions. Born Yılmaz Pütün near Adana to a Zaza Kurdish father and a Kurmanji Kurdish mother, he made films about Turkey’s poor and dispossessed.
Güney clashed repeatedly with the Turkish state over his depiction of Kurdish life and language; Yol even labelled a region on screen as “Kurdistan,” which was later censored. He escaped from prison, fled to France, lost his citizenship, and died in exile in Paris with many of his films banned at home. He is widely remembered as the father of Kurdish cinema.
4. İbrahim Tatlıses — the emperor of arabesque
For decades “İbo” was the biggest star in Turkish popular music: more than forty albums, a long-running television show, and the nickname “the Emperor.” Born in Şanlıurfa around 1952, Tatlıses is of mixed Arab and Kurdish background, and Kurdish is his first language.
He has given varying accounts of his identity over the years, which is itself revealing about the climate Kurdish performers worked in. But in 2003 he sang a song in Kurdish on his own programme and was investigated for “separatist propaganda” — a reminder that even Turkey’s most beloved entertainer was not shielded from the pressures surrounding Kurdish expression.
5. Ahmet Kaya — the singer who paid for one sentence
Ahmet Kaya (1957–2000) sold millions of records as one of Turkey’s most loved protest and folk singers. At a televised awards ceremony in 1999, he announced that he wanted to make a video for a song in Kurdish. The room turned on him: boos, thrown cutlery, a hostile press campaign branding him a traitor, and a prosecution for “separatist propaganda.”
Kaya went into self-exile in France and died of a heart attack in Paris the following year, aged 43. Born in Malatya to a Kurdish father and a Turkish mother, he did not speak Kurdish fluently but called himself “a Kurd of Turkey.” His grave at Père Lachaise cemetery — near that of Yılmaz Güney — has since been vandalised, and he remains a powerful symbol of the cost of speaking up.
6. Yılmaz Erdoğan — Turkey’s box-office king
Yılmaz Erdoğan is the writer, director, and star behind some of Turkey’s highest-grossing films, including Vizontele and its sequel, and a familiar face to international audiences from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner, for which he won an Australian Academy award.
He was born in 1967 in Hakkâri, a predominantly Kurdish city in the southeast, and is of Kurdish origin. His childhood there — including the upheaval of the 1980 coup — is the basis for the autobiographical Vizontele films, which fold the texture of life in the Kurdish southeast into mainstream Turkish comedy.
7. Belçim Bilgin — the actress descended from a rebellion
Belçim Bilgin is a leading Turkish screen actress, known internationally for films such as Winter Sleep-era Turkish cinema and for her marriage to Yılmaz Erdoğan. She was born in Ankara in 1983.
Her Kurdish lineage is striking. Bilgin is a great-grand-niece of Sheikh Said, the religious leader who led the 1925 Sheikh Said Rebellion against the new Turkish republic — one of the defining uprisings of modern Kurdish history. In her case, the “hidden” Kurdish connection reaches straight back to a pivotal moment in the Kurdish national story.
8. Kianoush Rostami — Olympic gold and a world record
At the Rio 2016 Olympics, Kianoush Rostami won Iran’s first gold medal of the Games in the 85 kg weightlifting category and set a world record with a total of 396 kilograms. He had already taken silver at London 2012.
Rostami was born in 1991 in Kermanshah Province in Iranian Kurdistan, known to Kurds as Rojhilat, to a Kurdish family. He made his identity unmistakable when he announced he would auction his Olympic gold to help victims of the 2017 earthquake on the Iran–Iraq border, saying he was “returning the medal to my people.” He has since taken up Kosovar citizenship to keep competing.
9. Kayhan Kalhor — the Grammy-winning master of the kamancheh
Kayhan Kalhor is widely regarded as the greatest living player of the kamancheh, the spike fiddle at the heart of Persian and Kurdish classical music. He has recorded and toured with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and the Kronos Quartet, earned multiple Grammy nominations, and shared a Grammy win in 2017.
Born in 1963 to a Kurdish family from Kermanshah and descended from the Kalhor tribe, he is often presented to Western audiences simply as an “Iranian” musician. But the landscapes and folk traditions of Iranian Kurdistan run audibly through his playing, even when he performs in purely Persian classical settings.
10. Zara — Russia’s celebrated pop voice
Zara is one of Russia’s most decorated pop singers: a Merited Artist of the Russian Federation and a UNESCO Artist for Peace, with a string of Golden Gramophone awards. Born Zarifa Mgoyan in Leningrad in 1983, she comes from a Yazidi-Kurdish family that had settled in Soviet Armenia.
She has spoken openly about her Kurdish identity, told Kurdish media she hopes to perform in Kurdistan, and released music in Kurdish — a reminder that the Kurdish story stretches well beyond the Middle East into the communities of the former Soviet Union. (She should not be confused with the separate Turkish folk singer also known as Zara, who is likewise of Kurdish descent.)
Myths and Misattributions
Because the Kurdish diaspora is large and the historical record is often patchy, plenty of “secretly Kurdish” claims circulate online that do not hold up. The most prominent example is Aziz Sancar, the 2015 Nobel laureate in Chemistry. He was born in Savur, in Mardin Province — a region with Arab, Kurdish, and Assyrian communities — and is frequently listed as Kurdish.
Sancar himself has rejected this firmly, telling reporters that he speaks neither Kurdish nor Arabic and considers himself Turkish, while relatives have described Arab ancestry. We have left him off this list out of respect for how he identifies. The principle is simple: heritage claims deserve evidence and, wherever possible, the person’s own words.
More Names Worth Knowing
Turkish cinema and music alone could fill a second list. Actor and singer Özcan Deniz, singer-director Mahsun Kırmızıgül, and actress Hülya Avşar are all of Kurdish descent, as is the German international midfielder Mahmoud Dahoud, a Syrian-born Kurd who came up through Borussia Mönchengladbach and Dortmund. Artists who foreground their Kurdish identity rather than hide it — Aynur Doğan, Şivan Perwer, Helly Luv — are a story for another day.
Related People, Places, and Topics
Saladin (Salah ad-Din): the Kurdish sultan who retook Jerusalem
Sheikh Said and the 1925 Sheikh Said Rebellion
Newroz: the Kurdish New Year and the legend of Kawa
The four parts of Kurdistan: Bakur, Başûr, Rojhilat, and Rojava
Yazidis and the question of Kurdish identity
Yılmaz Güney and the birth of Kurdish cinema
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the most famous Kurdish person?
Historically, the 12th-century sultan Saladin is the most globally famous Kurd. Among living figures, names range from political leaders such as Masoud Barzani to international figures like Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya. Fame depends heavily on the field and the audience.
Is İbrahim Tatlıses Kurdish?
Tatlıses is of mixed Arab and Kurdish heritage, and Kurdish is his first language. He has described his background in different ways over the years, but he sang in Kurdish publicly and was investigated for it, so his Kurdish roots are real and well attested.
Why did so many Kurdish celebrities hide their identity?
In Turkey especially, the Kurdish language was restricted in public life for decades and open Kurdish identity could be politically dangerous. For performers and public figures, working in Turkish and staying quiet about their roots was often the practical price of a national career.
Is Aziz Sancar Kurdish?
No. The Nobel laureate was born in Mardin Province, a mixed region, and is frequently but inaccurately listed as Kurdish. Sancar has publicly stated that he is Turkish and speaks neither Kurdish nor Arabic, and his family has described Arab ancestry.
Are Yazidis Kurdish?
It is debated. Yazidis are an ethno-religious community rooted in the Kurdish-speaking world; many identify as Kurds, while some consider themselves a distinct people. Figures such as Deniz Undav and the singer Zara come from Yazidi-Kurdish backgrounds and are commonly counted among notable Kurds.
References and Further Reading
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