The Kurdish Table at the End of the World: Food, Memory, and the Kitchen That Cannot Be Erased

Jamal Latif
May 31
6 min read

The Kurdish Table at the End of the World: Food, Memory, and the Kitchen That Cannot Be Erased

One hundred and fifty articles. One hundred and fifty foods, dishes, drinks, preserves, wild plants, and food traditions of the Kurdish kitchen. The series opened with the terebinth coffee of the mountain and closes, in two articles’ time, with the mountain itself. In between: the olive whose domestication began in the Kurdish hills, the wheat that was first planted near Karacadağ, the wild grape still climbing the Zagros oaks, the fig that is the oldest cultivated fruit in human history, the honey from the zozan pastures, the bread from the clay oven, the pit-roasted lamb of Siirt, the pomegranate of Halabja, the wedding feast copper cauldrons, the forty bowls of aşure sent to forty houses at Muharram, the small amber cube of şekirklo placed between the teeth before the tea. One hundred and fifty expressions of a kitchen that should not, by the logic of the twentieth century, still exist. The Kurdish people do not have a state. In Turkey, Kurdish identity and language were legally suppressed for decades; dishes with Kurdish names were renamed, traditions were attributed to other cultures, and the word ‘Kurdish’ was removed from the vocabulary of the official culture. In Iraq, the Ba’athist regime destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages and drove hundreds of thousands of people from their ancestral lands. In Iran and Syria, similar patterns of cultural suppression have shaped the landscape of Kurdish life. And yet: the reçel is still made in September. The tirşî jar still goes onto the shelf in October. The şorba nîsk is still cooked on Tuesday nights in apartments in Berlin and Stockholm and Toronto. The mîvanperwerî is still practised — the guest is still fed before anything is spoken. The Kurdish kitchen survived because the Kurdish people survived, and because food, of all the carriers of cultural identity, is the hardest to confiscate. This is the one-hundred-and-fiftieth article in the series. One article remains after this one. Before the series ends, Jamal names what it has been about.

Key Takeaways

• The Kurdish kitchen survived suppression, displacement, and exile because food is the hardest cultural carrier to confiscate

• Kurdish dishes were renamed and appropriated, but the knowledge of how to make them survived in Kurdish hands

• The Kurdish diaspora carried the kitchen into every city in the world — a travelling table that never emptied

• One hundred and fifty articles: one hundred and fifty proofs that the Kurdish kitchen is alive and cannot be erased

Quick Facts

Series Length: 150 articles covering Kurdish food from the terebinth mountain coffee to the Tigris watermelon

Writers: Sherko Sabir (ecology/foraging), Dala Sarkis (Bakur), Mehmet Özdemir (Amed/Bakur), Jamal Latif (cultural synthesis), Mero Ranyayi (preservation)

Central Thesis: The Kurdish mountains gave the world its food. The Kurdish people fed each other and fed the world. The table never emptied.

Next: Article #151 — Sherko Sabir’s grand conclusion

What Cannot Be Confiscated

The state can suppress a language. It can rename a city, redraw a border, prohibit a word, burn a library. What it cannot easily do is stop a grandmother from making reçel in September, or a family from sending aşure to their neighbours in Muharram, or a Kurdish woman in Berlin from opening a bag of red lentils on a Tuesday night and making the soup that her mother made and her grandmother made on the mountain. This is the specific resilience of food as a cultural carrier: it is practised in kitchens, not in institutions; it is transmitted through touch and smell and taste, not through official channels; it requires no permission and produces no document. You cannot stamp a passport ‘denied’ on someone’s knowledge of how to make şekirklo. You cannot draw a border that the taste of somaq does not cross. This series has documented the attempt, across the twentieth century, to erase Kurdish food’s Kurdish identity: the qehweya kezwanê rebranded as a Turkish specialty; the tişike labelled Eastern Anatolian; the keledöş given a Turkish geographical indication with no mention of the Kurdish cities it belongs to; the çiğ köfte removed from its Kurdish origin and sold as a vegan Turkish snack. These erasures happened. They were documented in this series honestly. And alongside them, in every article, is the same counter-documentation: Cihan, a Kurdish teacher in London, who says that Kurdish hospitality is renowned because of ‘our robust culinary heritage and our genuine openness to sharing it with others.’ The Kurdish families in Sulaymaniyah, Van, Mardin, Sanandaj, and Erbil who still make bih jam in October and send bowls of aşure to forty houses in winter and crack open a fifty-kilogram watermelon at a table where whoever has arrived is welcome. The knowledge survived. The practice survived. The generosity survived.

The Travelling Table

There are Kurdish communities in Berlin, in Stockholm, in London, in Toronto, in Melbourne, in Nashville. They came there from Bakur and Bashur and Rojhelat and Rojava, from the mountains and the cities and the plains, by routes that were rarely chosen and rarely comfortable. And in every city where they arrived, they brought the kitchen. Not always physically — though there are stories of women who carried dried terxena disks and bags of somaq and jars of tirşî in their luggage, knowing that what they were carrying was more important than anything else they could bring. But in memory: the knowledge of how to make the things that tasted like home. Marilyn Gardner, an American writer who lived in Kurdistan, wrote that food there ‘is friendship, nourishment, and hospitality: these things sustain us longer and more deeply than mere calories.’ That is true everywhere, but it is specifically true for people who have been forced to leave the place where the food grew. For the Kurdish diaspora, the şorba nîsk made in a Berlin apartment is not just a soup. It is the Tuesday night proof that you are still Kurdish, that the kitchen survived the journey, that the mountain is still in your hands even when it is not under your feet. ‘If Kurdish hospitality is renowned today,’ says Cihan, a Kurdish language teacher, ‘it’s because of our robust culinary heritage and our genuine openness to sharing it with others.’ The key word is ‘sharing.’ The Kurdish table does not keep its food. It gives it away. It sends it to forty neighbours. It opens to every guest. It cracks the watermelon and cuts it for whoever is present. The table could not be erased because it does not belong to any single place or state. It belongs to whoever comes to the door.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is food the most resilient carrier of Kurdish identity?

Food is transmitted through practice rather than institutions. It requires no official permission, produces no document, and cannot be easily prohibited or confiscated. A language can be suppressed by banning its use in public; a food tradition can only be lost if the people who practise it stop practising it. The Kurdish kitchen has survived decades of political suppression across four states because it was practised in homes and kitchens and at tables, transmitted from mothers to daughters to grandchildren, and carried in the memory and the hands of people who left the mountain and made the soup anyway in wherever they arrived.

How has Kurdish food been erased or appropriated?

Throughout the twentieth century, dishes with Kurdish origins were renamed, attributed to other national cuisines, and given geographical indications that omitted their Kurdish identity. Qehweya kezwanê (terebinth coffee) was rebranded as a Turkish specialty. The keledöş of Bitlis and Van was awarded a Turkish GI with no mention of the Kurdish cities it belongs to. The tişike stew and many other dishes are listed as ‘Eastern Anatolian’ — a geographic term that erases Kurdish specificity. Çiğ köfte was industrialised and sold internationally as a vegan Turkish snack. This series has documented these erasures honestly while arguing that the food itself remains Kurdish: made by Kurdish hands, transmitted in Kurdish households, eaten at Kurdish tables.

What has this series argued, in one sentence?

The Kurdish mountains gave the world its most important food plants, and the Kurdish people — without a state, across four borders, in dozens of exiles — fed each other and fed every stranger who came to their door, and still do.

Conclusion

The Kurdish Table at the End of the World is the one-hundred-and-fiftieth article in the series. One hundred and fifty expressions of a kitchen that survived. One hundred and fifty proofs that you cannot confiscate a taste, cannot deport a recipe, cannot imprison the knowledge of how to make aşure for forty neighbours in winter or bread in a clay oven at four in the morning or a bowl of lentil soup on a Tuesday night far from the mountain. The mountain gave the world the wheat and the olive and the grape and the fig. The people of that mountain carry the mountain in their hands every time they make any of these one hundred and fifty things. The table does not empty. One article remains.