Kanzar: The Kurdish Wild Mushroom and the Forests of the Zagros

Sherko Sabir
May 30
6 min read

Kanzar: The Kurdish Wild Mushroom and the Forests of the Zagros

In the spring, after the first rains, the oak forests of the Zagros come alive in a way that most visitors miss: under the leaf litter of the old trees, in the meadows between the ridges, in the damp shadow of the rocky valley walls, the mushrooms emerge. The Kurdish communities of Bashur — Iraqi Kurdistan, the mountain provinces of Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, and Duhok — have been gathering wild mushrooms from these forests for generations, and the collecting is a family event: a morning walk into the oak hills, a basket, the specific knowledge of where to look and when. Edible mushrooms and truffles are integral to the local cuisine of Kurdistan, and their collection is a traditional activity in many Kurdish communities. This is the foraging tradition that this series has been circling for a long time. It has covered the wild sorrel (avelik) and the wild rhubarb (rewas) and the wild garlic (sirmo) and the wild leek; it has covered the mountain honey gathered from the zozan hives and the mountain herbs pressed into herbed cheese. But it has not yet covered the food that grows in the forest itself, underground and in the leaf litter: the mushroom. Kurdish ethnobotanical research in Bashur has documented Kurdish foragers gathering two specific folk mushroom taxa for food, and academic surveys of the Kurdistan Region have identified seventeen mushroom species across mountain sites including Barzan, Shaqlawa, and Khalefan. The Zagros oak forest is not just the wild ancestor range of the walnut and the apricot. It is a mushroom forest. This is the one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh article in the series. Sherko has written about the foraged greens and the mountain honey and the wild rhubarb and the fig and the wheat. Now he writes about what grows in the forest floor when the rains come in spring.

Key Takeaways

• Kanzar (Kurdish wild mushroom) is foraged from the Zagros oak forests of Bashur — a traditional community practice

• Peer-reviewed ethnobotanical research documents Kurdish mushroom foraging across Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, and Duhok

• 17 mushroom species identified in Kurdistan Region including oyster mushroom, field mushroom, and others

• Also truffles — the spring desert truffle foraged in drier areas of Bashur, sold in Sulaymaniyah markets

Quick Facts

Kurdish Name: Kanzar / mantar (mushroom); zbalane / kumar (truffle, the underground foraging prize)

Habitat: Zagros oak forests (Barzan, Shaqlawa, Khalefan, Mergasor, Duhok mountain sites); meadows and valley walls

Season: Spring (after rains) for most species; autumn for some; truffles also in spring after winter rains

Eaten: Sautéed in butter with eggs or herbs; dried for storage; truffles grilled or scrambled with eggs; sold in local markets

The Forest Floor and the Market Basket

The Zagros oak forests of Bashur are among the most biodiverse woodland systems in the Middle East. The dominant tree is Quercus infectoria, the oak whose galls are used in traditional medicine, whose acorns fed the wild boar and the bear, whose fallen leaves make the forest floor into a mat of slowly composting organic matter that is, for mushrooms, an ideal substrate. Academic surveys of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq have documented seventeen mushroom species from fourteen genera at sites across the mountain provinces: in Barzan (the valley of the Barzani homeland in the Bradost mountains), in Shaqlawa (the resort mountain above Erbil), in Khalefan, Mergasor, Tawska, and Taqtaq — all mountain sites, all within the oak and mixed forest zone of the Zagros. Among the documented edible species are Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom), Agaricus campestris (field mushroom), Agaricus bisporus (the button mushroom’s wild cousin), and Coprinus comatus (shaggy ink cap). These are gathered by Kurdish communities in spring and autumn, eaten fresh (sautéed in mountain butter or broken into eggs), and in some cases dried for storage. The Sulaymaniyah markets carry wild mushrooms in season alongside the foraged greens — the same stalls that sell sirmo and avelik and rewas also offer the spring mushroom harvest, priced by weight, sold by the family that picked them. And beneath the forested slopes, in the drier and more open areas of Bashur, something else comes up after the spring rains: the truffle. The Kurdish truffle — called zbalane or kumar in some dialects — is a desert truffle (Terfezia or Tirmania species), smaller and paler than the European truffle but deeply fragrant and specifically prized. It is found by walking and looking for the small cracks in the dry soil that indicate a truffle pushing upwards from below. The spring truffle hunt is its own separate tradition from the forest mushroom forage: no forest, no shade, just open land, experienced eyes, and the knowledge of where last year’s truffles were.

The Zagros Oak Forest and the Kurdish Forager

This series has mentioned the Zagros oak forest many times but has never given it its own article. It is the ecosystem that gave the world the wild walnut and the wild pistachio and the wild almond; it is where the forager finds sirmo in spring and avelik in early summer and rewas in the mountain meadows. It is, according to ethnobotanical research, one of the world’s most important hotspots for traditional wild food plant foraging — a place where, peer-reviewed studies have found, Kurdish foragers in Bashur gather 54 plant taxa and two mushroom taxa for food, and where the knowledge of what to pick and how to prepare it has survived millennia of political disruption, forced displacement, and environmental change. The mushroom is not the most important of the Zagros forages. The greens come in larger quantities and are more widely used. But the mushroom has something the greens do not: it belongs entirely to the forest. You cannot find a kanzar in a field. You cannot cultivate it in a garden. It grows where the oak trees grow, in the specific microclimate of the decaying leaf litter, and it is only there because the forest is there. When the Zagros forests are cleared for agriculture or logged for timber or burned in conflict, the mushrooms disappear. They are the most direct indicator species of the forest’s health, and they belong to the Kurdish table only as long as the Zagros oak forest does too.

Frequently Asked Questions

What wild mushrooms grow in the Kurdistan Region?

Academic surveys have documented seventeen mushroom species in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, across mountain sites including Barzan, Shaqlawa, Khalefan, and Mergasor. Edible species include Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom), Agaricus campestris (field mushroom), Agaricus bisporus, and Coprinus comatus. The Zagros oak forests provide the woodland substrate that supports the majority of these species. Ethnobotanical research has confirmed that Kurdish foragers in Bashur (Iraqi Kurdistan) gather two specific folk mushroom taxa for food.

What are Kurdish truffles?

Kurdistan has its own truffle tradition distinct from European truffle culture. Desert truffles (Terfezia and Tirmania species, known as zbalane or kumar in Kurdish dialects) grow in the drier, more open areas of Bashur after spring rains. They are found by walking and looking for soil cracks indicating a truffle pushing upwards. Smaller and paler than European truffles but genuinely fragrant, they are grilled, scrambled with eggs, or simply cooked in butter and sold in the spring markets of Sulaymaniyah and Erbil.

Are Kurdish mushrooms under threat?

Yes. Flora Kurdica notes that the fungi of Kurdistan face challenges from habitat loss due to deforestation, agricultural expansion, and urbanisation. Climate change also threatens the delicate ecosystem balance. Wild mushrooms are among the most sensitive indicators of forest health — they grow only where old-growth oak forest survives, and their disappearance signals deforestation before the trees themselves are gone. Conservation of the Zagros oak forest is essential for the survival of this foraging tradition.

Conclusion

Kanzar is the one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh article in the series, and the one that finally goes underground. Everything Sherko has written for this series has been about what grows above the soil: the sorrel and the rhubarb and the garlic and the herbs and the honey and the fig and the wheat. The kanzar grows below. It lives in the dark, in the forest floor, and comes up after rain into a world it shares with nobody. The Kurdish forager who finds it knows the forest the way the mushroom does: by memory, by season, by the angle of the light when the rains come. The kanzar is food, but it is also a measure of the forest’s health and the forager’s relationship with a landscape that fed human beings long before the first wheat was planted on Karacadağ. One hundred and thirty-seven articles in, the Kurdish table is complete to its depths.