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Nuri Dersimi: The Physician Who Refused to Let Dersim Be Forgotten (1893–1973)

Updated: Mar 16

In the spring of 1937, the Turkish Army entered the region of Dersim in eastern Anatolia with artillery, aircraft, and poison gas, and proceeded to kill between forty thousand and seventy thousand Kurdish Alevi civilians in an operation that the Turkish government would not officially acknowledge as a massacre for over seventy years. One of the survivors of that catastrophe — a physician who had practiced medicine in Dersim before the massacre, who fled into exile afterward, and who spent the next four decades writing, documenting, and insisting that what had happened in Dersim would not be forgotten — was Nuri Dersimi. He is the man who refused to let Dersim be forgotten, and that refusal was his life's work.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Dersim — A People Apart

Dersim — today known as Tunceli Province in eastern Turkey — is a mountainous region inhabited by a Kurdish Alevi population who speak the Zaza language and practise a syncretic form of Islam that combines elements of Shia devotion, pre-Islamic Kurdish tradition, and local religious practice. The Dersim Kurds were, by any measure, a distinct community: ethnically Kurdish but Alevi rather than Sunni, linguistically Zaza rather than Kurmanji, geographically isolated in mountains that had preserved their autonomy across centuries of Ottoman rule.

Part 2: The Making of a Physician and a Nationalist

Nuri Dersimi was born in 1893 in Dersim. He trained as a physician and returned to Dersim to practice medicine among his own people. He was also politically active in Kurdish nationalist circles during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, connecting the Dersim community to the wider Kurdish national movement. His political activity made him a target of Republican security services, and he was already living in a precarious political situation when the events of 1937–1938 transformed his life permanently.

Part 3: The Dersim Massacre of 1937–1938

In 1937, a local uprising in Dersim triggered a massive military response from the Turkish state. The army, operating under orders from Ankara and using aircraft, artillery, and poison gas, killed between forty thousand and seventy thousand people — estimates vary — destroyed hundreds of villages, and deported the surviving population to western Anatolia. It was the largest single act of violence against a Kurdish population in the Turkish Republic's history until the depopulation of Kurdish villages in the 1990s.

Part 4: Flight and Exile — The Long Years Outside Turkey

Nuri Dersimi escaped the massacre and fled into exile. He lived in Syria, Iraq, and other countries in the Middle East, working as a physician to support himself while writing his historical and political works. He never returned to Turkey, never saw Dersim again. He died in 1973 in exile, having spent the last thirty-six years of his life as a refugee from the state that had destroyed his community.

Part 5: The Historian's Mission — Writing Dersim's Memory

From exile, Dersimi wrote with a single overriding purpose: to document what had happened in Dersim before it could be completely erased by the silence of the Turkish state. He understood that the massacre would be denied, minimised, and forgotten if survivors did not record it while they still could. His most important work, Hatıratlarım (My Memoirs), published in 1952, provided the first detailed account of the Dersim massacre from the perspective of a survivor. He also wrote extensively on the history and ethnography of the Dersim Kurds, the Alevi tradition, and the broader Kurdish national movement.

Part 6: Dersimi's Major Works

Dersimi published four major works: Hatıratlarım (My Memoirs, 1952), Dersim ve Kürt Milli Mücadelesine Dair (On Dersim and the Kurdish National Struggle, 1952), Kürdistan Tarihinde Dersim (Dersim in the History of Kurdistan, 1952), and a later work on Kurdish history. Together, these books constitute a comprehensive account of Dersim history, ethnography, religion, and the events of 1937–1938 from the perspective of a participant and survivor. They were written in Turkish and Arabic, in the languages that could reach the audiences that needed to know what had happened.

Part 7: The Alevi Dimension — Religion, Identity, and Survival

The Alevi identity of the Dersim population was both a cultural reality that Dersimi documented extensively and a political factor that shaped the violence of 1937–1938. The Kemalist state regarded the Alevis of Dersim as doubly deviant: ethnically Kurdish in a state that denied Kurdish existence, and religiously heterodox in a state that was trying to impose a standardised Sunni Hanafi Islam on the Muslim population. Dersimi's writings preserve the details of Alevi religious practice in Dersim with the awareness of a man who understood that if he did not record them, they might be lost.

Part 8: The Diaspora Intellectual — Writing Against Forgetting

Nuri Dersimi belongs to the tradition of diaspora intellectuals who used their exile not as a reason for silence but as a platform for testimony. He had no institutional support, no university, no publisher beyond small diaspora presses. He wrote because he understood that memory was a political act — that to remember Dersim was to resist the Turkish state's attempt to erase it, that to document the massacre was to deny the perpetrators the full victory of historical obliteration. In this sense, his writing was an extension of the resistance of the Dersim people themselves.

Part 9: Legacy — The Physician Who Preserved a Genocide's Memory

Without Nuri Dersimi's books, the history of the Dersim massacre would have been almost entirely dependent on Turkish state sources and the fragmented oral memories of deportees scattered across Anatolia. He provided the detailed, systematic account of Dersim history and the events of 1937–1938 that made it possible for later researchers — Turkish, Kurdish, and international — to reconstruct what had happened. When the Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan offered a partial acknowledgement of the Dersim massacre in 2011, it was possible partly because Dersimi's work had kept the memory alive long enough for it to re-enter Turkish public discourse. That is his legacy.

Key Events Timeline

1893 — Born in Dersim, eastern Anatolia.

c. early 1920s — Trains as a physician; returns to Dersim to practice medicine.

1937 — Turkish Army operations begin in Dersim; massacre and deportation of Kurdish Alevi population.

1937–1938 — Dersimi escapes; begins long exile in Syria, Iraq, and other countries.

1952 — Publishes three major works: Hatıratlarım, Dersim ve Kürt Milli Mücadelesine Dair, and Kürdistan Tarihinde Dersim.

1973 — Dies in exile, having never returned to Dersim or Turkey.

2011 — Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan offers partial acknowledgement of the Dersim massacre — made possible in part by Dersimi's preserved documentation.

Chronology of Nuri Dersimi

1893 — Born in Dersim.

1937–1938 — Dersim Massacre; escapes; enters exile.

1952 — Publishes major historical works on Dersim.

1973 — Dies in exile.

References

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Nuri Dersimi?

Nuri Dersimi (1893–1973) was a Kurdish Alevi physician from Dersim (today Tunceli Province, Turkey) who survived the Dersim Massacre of 1937–1938 and spent four decades in exile documenting what had happened. His books — particularly Hatıratlarım and Kürdistan Tarihinde Dersim — are the primary historical record of the Dersim people and the massacre from a survivor's perspective.

What was the Dersim Massacre?

The Dersim Massacre (1937–1938) was a military operation by the Turkish state against the Kurdish Alevi population of Dersim. Using artillery, aircraft, and poison gas, the Turkish Army killed between 40,000 and 70,000 people, destroyed hundreds of villages, and deported the surviving population. The Turkish government did not officially acknowledge the event as a massacre until 2011.

Why is Nuri Dersimi historically significant?

Without Dersimi's books, the history of the Dersim Massacre would have been almost entirely dependent on Turkish state sources. He provided the detailed, systematic account of Dersim history and the events of 1937–1938 that made it possible for later researchers to reconstruct what had happened. His work preserved the memory of the massacre across four decades of Turkish denial, making its eventual partial official acknowledgement possible.

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