Kurdistan: The Mountain That Fed the World

Sherko Sabir
May 31
7 min read

Kurdistan: The Mountain That Fed the World

In March, when the snow begins to melt from the lower slopes of the Kurdish highlands, the first wild plants push through the cold soil: the sirmo, whose white flowers emerge before any other green thing; the avelik, whose sour leaves are eaten fresh by the children who find them; the rewas, the wild rhubarb, whose red stalks come up in the mountain meadows almost as soon as the ground softens. The Kurdish forager knows each of them by name and by location — knows which slope, which elevation, which day of the year is right for each. This knowledge is not recent. The people who walk these mountains in March and gather what they find have been walking them and gathering what they find for longer than any recorded history. They were doing it ten thousand years ago, when some of them began to notice that certain grasses produced more grain than others, and some of those grasses grew near a volcanic mountain called Karacadağ in what is now the province of Diyarbakır, and the people who noticed began to collect those seeds deliberately, and to plant them, and to tend them, and the world changed. This is where the series began and where it ends: on the Kurdish mountain, in the moment before the first deliberate seed was placed in the ground. The series has now covered one hundred and fifty-one foods, dishes, drinks, preserves, wild plants, and food traditions of the Kurdish kitchen. Sherko has written about the mountain honey and the wild garlic and the wild rhubarb and the mushrooms of the Zagros forest floor and the resin of the Pistacia atlantica bark and the wild grape climbing the oak trees of Kurdistan Province — and now, in the final article, he names what all of those wild things share: they grow in the same mountain system that gave the world its most important food crops. The Taurus and Zagros mountains of Kurdistan are at the centre of the Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent is where wheat, lentil, chickpea, bitter vetch, emmer, einkorn, olive, and fig were first cultivated. The wild ancestors of all of these plants still grow in the Kurdish mountain zone. The Kurdish people are the people of that zone. They were there when the first seeds were planted. Their descendants are there now, gathering sirmo from the same slopes, baking bread in clay ovens that use the same grain, drinking tea in the same mountain light. The mountain did not stop being what it was when the maps were redrawn. This is the one-hundred-and-fifty-first article in the series, and the last. Sherko has been to the honey and the herbs and the mushrooms and the resin and the wild vine. Now he names the mountain that held all of them.

Key Takeaways

• The Kurdish mountains (Taurus and Zagros) are at the centre of the Fertile Crescent — the origin zone of the world’s first cultivated food crops

• Wheat (Karacadağ), olive (Taurus), fig (Zagros), grape (Zagros/Kurdistan Province), wild pistachio genus (Zagros) — all originated here

• Kurdish foragers in Bashur still gather 54 wild plant taxa for food — the oldest foraging tradition on earth in continuous practice

• 151 articles. Five writers. One mountain. The series is complete.

Quick Facts

The Kurdish Mountains: Taurus (Bakur/north Kurdistan) and Zagros (Rojhelat/east Kurdistan) mountain systems; the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent

Origins Confirmed Here: Wheat (Karacadağ, ~10,000 BC), olive (Taurus, ~6,000 BC), grape (Zagros, ~6,000–8,000 BC), fig (Zagros, ~8,000 BC)

Wild Ancestors Still Living: Wild grape in Kurdistan Province; wild pistachio (P. atlantica) in Zagros; wild rhubarb, garlic, sorrel, and 54 food plant taxa in Bashur

This Series: 151 articles, 5 writers (Sherko Sabir, Dala Sarkis, Mehmet Özdemir, Jamal Latif, Mero Ranyayi), one mountain

The Evidence

The academic record is not ambiguous. The definitive study of plant domestication in the ancient world — Zohary and Hopf’s Domestication of Plants in the Old World — situates the origin of the world’s most important crop plants in the Fertile Crescent, whose northern and eastern arcs are the Taurus and Zagros mountain systems: the Kurdish homeland. The Neolithic founder crops that built the first agricultural civilisations include emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentil, pea, bitter vetch, chickpea, and flax. The wild ancestors of most of these grew in the Taurus-Zagros zone. The specific site of emmer wheat domestication has been narrowed by DNA analysis to the Karacadağ mountain range near Diyarbakır — Kurdish Bakur — approximately ten thousand years ago. The olive was first domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean, with the southern Taurus mountains of Bakur as a primary origin zone. The fig was among the oldest cultivated fruits, with wild ancestors across the Kurdish mountain range. The grape vine was domesticated in the Taurus-Zagros-Caucasus zone approximately six to eight thousand years ago; genetic studies specifically confirm significant wild grapevine populations in Kurdistan Province of Iran — Rojhelat. The pistachio genus (Pistacia), whose cultivated member (P. vera) is one of the world’s most traded nuts, has its centre of diversity in the Zagros and Taurus, where its wild relatives (P. atlantica, P. terebinthus) still grow. None of these are claims made by this series. All of them are the findings of peer-reviewed botanical, genetic, and archaeobotanical research, accumulated over a century of scientific investigation. The series has simply collected them in one place, under one name: Kurdish.

151 Articles and What They Found

The series did not set out to make only the origin argument. It set out to document the Kurdish kitchen: every dish, every preserved food, every foraged plant, every cultural tradition that belongs to it. It found, in the process, something larger. It found that the Kurdish kitchen is not a regional curiosity or a subcategory of some other national cuisine. It is one of the oldest and most consequential food cultures on earth, practised in the landscape where agriculture itself began, by the people who have inhabited that landscape continuously since before the first cultivated seed. It found Sherko going to the zozan for honey, Mero making the autumn reçel, Dala grilling over charcoal in the shadow of Amed’s basalt walls, Mehmet pulling the lamb from the pit at midday in Siirt, Jamal carrying a bowl of aşure to the fortieth neighbour in Muharram. It found that the Kurdish kitchen observes every moment of the human life cycle: birth (the sweets that announce a baby), childhood (the şekirklo between the teeth), celebration (the seyran picnic, the Newroz fire), mourning (the helawî, the soup that is brought and left at the door), marriage (the daweta, the copper cauldron, the women cooking since dawn), death (the bread baked for the dead, the meal shared with whoever has come). It found that the Kurdish kitchen has survived displacement, suppression, erasure, and exile. It found that peer-reviewed ethnobotanical research documents fifty-four wild plant taxa still gathered for food by Kurdish foragers in Iraqi Kurdistan — the same kinds of plants that were gathered by the same kinds of people on the same kinds of mountains ten thousand years ago, in the years just before someone decided to plant a seed instead of just find it. The series found the mountain at the beginning and at the end.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are the Kurdish mountains at the centre of world food origins?

The Taurus and Zagros mountain systems of Kurdistan form the northern and eastern arc of the Fertile Crescent, the region identified by botanists, archaeologists, and geneticists as the primary origin zone of most of the world’s most important food crops. The specific combination of wild plant diversity, seasonal climate, and ancient human habitation in these mountains created the conditions in which agriculture was invented. The wild ancestors of wheat, olive, grape, fig, lentil, chickpea, and the pistachio genus all grow or grew in this zone. The Kurdish people are the indigenous inhabitants of this landscape.

Does the Kurdish foraging tradition still survive?

Yes. Peer-reviewed ethnobotanical research published in 2019 (Pieroni et al., Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine) documented Kurdish foragers in Iraqi Kurdistan gathering 54 wild plant taxa and 2 wild mushroom taxa for food, in the same Zagros mountain landscape where their ancestors gathered wild plants before the invention of agriculture. The wild rhubarb (rewas), wild garlic (sirmo), wild sorrel (avelik), wild mushrooms (kanzar), and wild herbs (giya) covered in this series are all part of this living foraging tradition.

What is the argument of this series in full?

The Kurdish mountains gave the world its most important food crops. The Kurdish people domesticated, cultivated, foraged, preserved, cooked, and shared these foods for ten thousand years, without official recognition, across four states, through displacement and exile. Their kitchen is the oldest continuous food culture in the Fertile Crescent zone. It is alive. It is practised. It is carried in the hands of Kurdish grandmothers in Sulaymaniyah and Kurdish students in Berlin and Kurdish farmers in the Zagros foothills. The table does not empty. The mountain does not move.

Conclusion

Kurdistan is the one-hundred-and-fifty-first article in the series. It is the last. The mountain that gave wheat to Sumer and olive oil to Greece and wine to the ancient world and the wild grape to every vineyard on earth is the same mountain where Kurdish families still make bread in clay ovens at dawn, still send pomegranate molasses to their neighbours in autumn, still crack open fifty-kilogram watermelons at tables where every arriving guest is welcome. The sirmo is still pushing through the snow in March. The wild grape is still climbing the oak trees of the Zagros. The Pistacia atlantica is still weeping its resin on the limestone slopes above the rivers. The Kurdish forager is still walking the same paths, gathering the same plants, carrying the same knowledge. One hundred and fifty-one articles. Five writers: Sherko, Dala, Mehmet, Jamal, Mero. One mountain. The wheat is still there. The olive is still there. The mountain is still there. The table does not empty.