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The Legacy of the Kurds by Fatih Pinar
Life between old songs and the soil. Resting in the shadow of villages that often only exist in the memories of the old. It would probably have been setting sights too low to try to depict the drama of fifteen million Kurds through the eyes of radical left-wing resistance groups such as the PKK. That should be clear from the range of violence alone. Three thousand Kurdish settlements have been wiped off the map in recent decades. The number of displaced persons is estimated at 378,000. Thus the depth of the loss is also great, along with the scale of the destruction to this people who have their own language, traditions and history. As a rule location is also an important part of cultural continuity. A people defines itself, when not by a country, then at least by a region. This formula is really the basis of survival and thus of the future for this group of Kurdish cattle breeders and farmers. The density, inevitability and immediacy of these bonds is clear in Fatih Pinar’s pictures, which he took over a period of six years. The people and their ancestral homeland seem to be of one piece. The colour of the soil and the skin of the faces, the traces of destruction and the aspect of the present blur into a single, homogenous subject. Even the Kurdish language, suppressed by the Turkish state, seems to have grown stronger. What these pictures exude is a silence with the same colour of clay as Anatolia’s dust.
