It’s 3.40 am in the morning and I’ve just got back from picking my Mum up from the airport. Not only was the plane delayed for over 2 hours, but British Airways lost her baggage. It might arrive tomorrow or Wednesday, but at least they gave her $100 as compensation on the spot.
Anyway, my Mum […]
After hearing so much from Nessuna about Lilith, a local girl studying design in Russia who’s about to continue her education in the U.K., I finally got the chance to meet her last night. Not only that, but along with Nahro Zagros, the Yorkshire Kurd, I got to play my first game of Mafia.
Mafia […]
I was going to post this as a comment to the post I made on Kate Bush earlier in the day, but this is such a marvelous find it merits a post in itself. I make no apologies at all for the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with Armenia or the South […]
Although this blog generally deals with news from Armenia and the South Caucasus, one other subject I post about is music. However, despite showing a little promise at the beginning of 2000, the contemporary Armenian music scene has become increasingly repetitive, predictable, unoriginal and tedious. There’s virtually no sense of individual or personal self-expression […]
After a meeting with yet another European academic visiting Armenia to research the Yezidi minority in the country I had some time to kill and decided to browse the CD/DVD shops on Yerevan’s central Abovian Street. Wasn’t expecting much as pretty much all of them stock the same tedious selection. Therefore, I was pleasantly suprised […]
The Times has more on the fight between a British and Armenian Chessmaster over an Australian female player. As reported earlier on this blog, Lev Aronian was floored by Danny Gormally after dancing too closely with Arianna Caoili. The next day, Aronian’s team mates apparently attacked Gormally who left the tournament and the country soon […]
RFE/RL reports on last night’s celebration staged in the early hours of the morning for Armenia’s returning Chess champions who took gold at the 37th Chess Olympiad in Turin. The report notes that the Armenian Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisyan also took the opportunity to bask in the spotlight as head of the Armenian Chess Federation. […]
MDP, Puppet Theatre, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2005
Ed from local rock band MDP tells me that there will be another rock concert staged at the Puppet Theatre in Yerevan toward the end of this month. The concert is being organized by another local rock band, Strife, and the British Embassy. These are the details Ed passed on.
There will be a concert-festival on May 22, again organized by British Embassy, this time under the “RockTheIntegration” title. MDP will play. I also informed Narek - Bambir will play too. Anticipating participation of Oaksenham, Aramazd, Strife, Empiray, maybe Vortan Karmir in Puppet theatre.
MDP, Puppet Theatre, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2005
Texas Bar, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006
Texas Bar, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006
From what I gather, these guys will be performing a proper gig rather than an improptu session at Emile’s Irish Pub on Friday in Yerevan. For those of you interested, their style is more Django Reinhardt than Kurdish in pretty much the same way that Emile’s is a restaurant and nothing like an Irish Pub. This last point is particularly disappointing given the quality of pubs in Tbilisi where they have Guinness on draught. There is none here. Anyway, I blogged more about Nahro and what he’s doing in Armenia here.
Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006
Almost everyone that knows me remembers that inbetween visiting Karabakh in 1994 and moving to Yerevan in 1998 I spent years working on the Kurds and human rights in Turkey. Ironically, it was even the Kurds that brought me back to Armenia after so long away. Visiting the country to research the Yezidi minority for the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP), I was offered a job with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and set foot on Armenian soil in October 1998.
Many Armenians advised me to steer clear of Kurdish issues in Armenia, but old habits die hard. A year and a half ago I wrote my most recent article on the Yezidi in Armenia for Transitions Online.
The Yezidi community is the largest ethnic minority in Armenia even though it numbers just a few tens of thousands of adherents. Although their precise number worldwide is unknown, the followers of this ancient religion are spread throughout Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, and, as recent immigrants and refugees, Germany.
Widely misconceived as “devil worship,” Yezidism in fact combines elements from Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Yet despite the widespread belief that they are also ethnic Kurds who resisted pressure to convert to Islam, there have been attempts in Armenia to identify the Yezidis as a separate ethnic group since the last years of Soviet rule.
Soviet-style demography, which determined communal identity based on language and largely ignored religion, identified the Yezidis and Muslim Kurds living in Armenia together as members of the same ethnic group. But by 1988, during the period of glasnost, some of Armenia’s Yezidi religious and political leaders began to challenge this notion and the “Yezidi Movement” was formed.
The following year an appeal was made to the Soviet authorities requesting that the Yezidis be considered a separate ethnic group. The request was granted, and in the last Soviet census conducted in 1989, out of approximately 60,000 Kurds who had been formerly identified as living in the Soviet Republic of Armenia, 52,700 were for the first time given a new official identity as Yezidis.
Because of the sensitivity of what appears to be an artificial division of the Yezidi in Armenia in ways that do not exist to such an extent elsewhere I’ve always made my interviews on the subject freely available so people can read everything that was said and make their own mind up. As a result, this work is apparently read a lot by Kurdologists and others working on the Yezidi, and so I get to meet a lot of researchers and academics when they come to Armenia to study the republic’s largest ethnic minority.
So, in addition to a French academic in town at present, it’s been a great pleasure this week to meet Nahro Zagros, an ethnic Kurd from Iraq now living and studying in the UK. The Guardian published a piece on him last month.
A long, painful journey brought Nahro Zagros from classically trained violinist and lecturer in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to playing gigs in Hull with a band called Yorkshire Kurd.
Soon he is off on another journey to Armenia to study the music and culture of the semi-nomadic Yezidis. For, with help from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (Cara), Zagros is doing a masters degree in ethnomusicology at York University, researching how music can display cultural identity.
[…]
Following a short visit to Kurdistan to see his relatives, he was imprisoned for nearly six months in 2000. He fled Iraq shortly afterwards.
Dispersed to Hull, he sought out other musicians and formed Yorkshire Kurd, playing gigs to raise money for refugees and giving workshops and performances in local schools to promote diversity. They have also performed at festivals in Britain and abroad, playing a fusion of Middle Eastern music, swing jazz, eastern European Gypsy music and Jewish klezmer. “We like to combine all these great tunes and show people we can work together and promote integration through music.”
In particular, Nahro is interesting because of his love of music. In fact, it seems as though he can’t live without it. On Friday, for example, while celebrating his birthday, he soon forgot that he was a customer at one bar/restaurant in Yerevan and had to get up to play. Actually, he apparently does this wherever he goes — including during research trips to Yezidi villages. He also has a great love for Armenian culture and it was interesting to learn from him that Komitas, for example, composed songs in Kurdish as well as Armenian, Persian and Turkish.
Would love to hear some, but anyway, it’s been a delight to meet Nahro and I hope to have more on him in the context of the Yezidi and Kurds in Armenia at a later date.
Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006
