From Impressions of Turkey during
twelve years' wanderings by Sir William Mitchell
Ramsay
KURDS.—My
earlier experiences of the Kurds were
unfavorable. In the Haimane district, the
high-lying plains and hills, south of Angora,
several tribes of Kurds live a nomadic and more
or less independent life. They made on me the
impression of being ruder in manners, more
niggardly and grasping, and less hospitable, than
Turks or Turkmens. I remember in August, 1883,
with Prof. Sterrett, visiting the great Bey of
the western Haimane Kurds; and he entertained us
with what he called sherbet, which was only
dirty-looking water sweetened with sugar.
Sterrett manfully drank his glass, and kept up
our credit for decent manners; but I could not
get the stuff down. The same general type of
character seemed to rule everywhere we met them;
and in 1886 Brown and I, crossing the Eastern
Haimane, spent a night at the camp of the other
great Bey, and I acquired a positive dislike for
Kurds. They were not inhospitable: they sold us
all we wanted, and invited us to call on the
great man, close to whose tent ours was pitched.
But they were to me repellent; and I doubt if I
could ever have been able to get on friendly
terms with them.
The
Kurds of the Haimane had the reputation of being
very unruly and dangerous. At one time they were
practically independent, and paid no tribute; but
now they are more peaceable. It seemed advisable
in 1883 to take a zaptieh, in order to have some
show of authority, while we were wandering in
this district. He told us that the Kurds were now
perfectly quiet, and traveling was quite safe: it
had been very different formerly, but the present
Kaimmakam, a Circassian, had taught them a
lesson: he could not, of course, get authority to
execute any of them (p. 149), but he had a
practice of beating severely any one that was
arrested, and it chanced that every one after
being beaten died, and the Haimane was now at
rest.
This was one out
of many instances, in various parts of the
country, of the immense effect produced by one or
two examples of rigor. As soon as it comes to be
known in any district that the reins of power are
in a firm hand, and that disorder will be
punished, the whole country under that governor
becomes as peaceable and quiet as any part of Britain;
but such governors are very rare, for a governor
has usually other fish to fry. The Circassians
are the most difficult to keep in order; and they
furnish a larger proportion of the thieves than
any other class; their principle is the motto of
the old Border family, "Thou shalt want ere
I want".
The
Kurds of the Euphrates country impressed me much
more favorably than those of the Haimane; but I
have seen far less of them. In 1890, Hogarth and
I, crossing their country, had the reputation of
being engineers prospecting for a railway; and
the idea of a railway is almost always highly
popular. Every one knows that a railway brings
money, and openings for work and earning, and
increases the value of land. Many people also,
not Christians alone, welcome a railway as the
herald of a new form of government a la
Franga, in which Europeans shall renovate the
country. Every Kurd village welcomed us
effusively, and at one village the son of the Bey
said to one of our servants: "All our men
are thieves, but if you lose anything, come to
me, and I will get it back for you".
Hospitality and frankness could go no further
than that.1
Professor
Sterrett, however, who crossed the same country
in 1884, says: " The whole mountain country
between Arga and the Tokluna Su is inhabited
solely by Kurds, an inhospitable, murderous set
of filthy villains, who still preserve all the
ferocious characteristics of their ancestors, the
ancient Kardouchoi, of whom Xenophon has little
good to report in the Anabasis "; and
he wrote to me at the time that his whole party
had a narrow escape from them.
Impressions
of Turkey during twelve years' wanderings; Sir
William Mitchell Ramsay, G.P. Putnam's sons, 1897