Shared Ownership and Kurdish Folklore

Abstract

I examine the concept of ‘shared ownership’ in folklore, through a comparative study of Kurdish and other Middle Eastern proverbs and folk expressions. I begin with a few examples of shared ownership, such as baklava, a Middle Eastern pastry which every people in the region claims as their own, and the song known in Turkish as “Üsküdar”, the melody of which is shared by all the neighboring peoples: Greeks, Albanians, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians. This is followed by eight examples from Kurdish folklore, with equivalents in the folklore of the neighboring peoples (Persians, Turks, Assyrians, Kurdish Jews, Armenians, etc.).

A few months before his demise, my professor Alan Dundes, the great American folklorist, introduced me to the Bulgarian documentary film “Chiya e tazi pesen?” [Whose song is this?]. The film was made by the Bulgarian ethnomusicologist Adela Peeva. Several years ago, she was in Istanbul on a visit, and one evening an international group of friends gathered for dinner at a restaurant. That evening, a woman appeared on the stage, and sang the Turkish song “Üsküdar”. After she finished singing the song, each one of Adela’s friends insisted that that song was in fact from his or her respective country. One said, “This song is Greek!”, another said, “No, it’s Albanian”!” A third claimed it was Serbian, and a fourth maintained that it was Macedonian. Adela herself was sure that she had heard that tune in Bulgaria as well. After that evening, Ms. Peeva decided to make a tour of the Balkan countries in search of that song. She started in Turkey, then proceeded to Greece, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia and Macedonia, ending up in Bulgaria.

Dr. Alan Dundes loved the documentary film which resulted from her tour, because he regarded it as a sterling example of the concept of “shared ownership”. The exact provenance of the song was not resolved by the end of the film, but it was clear that the tune had spread to the lands of the Balkan Peninsula at an early date, and today each of the nations of the region considers that song – or that melody, to be more exact – to be part and parcel of its national heritage.

Another example of shared ownership is the delicious Middle Eastern pastry known as baklava. Is baklava originally Kurdish or Turkish or Greek or Armenian or Arab or Assyrian? If asked, each one of these peoples will no doubt claim to be the inventor of baklava.

What we can assert about both of these examples is that each of the neighboring peoples of a given region claims this tune or this pastry for itself. Whatever the actual origin of these items is, today each of them is claimed by several different nations: this is “shared ownership”.

In what follows, we will examine some proverbs and sayings from Kurdish folklore which are shared by neighboring peoples.

1. When one recovers from an illness or is rescued from an unpleasant situation, or when one returns safely from a journey, it is customary to wish that person Derbazbûyî be [lit. ‘May it be passed/over’]. Many people consider this to be borrowed from Turkish, because the Turks say Geçmiş olsun [‘May it be passed’] in the same situation. If this expression existed only in Kurdish and Turkish, I might also be tempted to suspect that it was of Turkish origin. However, since the same expression also exists in Armenian, Greek and Albanian, and is used under the same conditions, the matter is not as simple as that.

It seems that Derbazbûyî be, etc. is an Ottoman expression, as it is found in at least five languages of the Ottoman Empire.1

A dissenting view of this Kurdish greeting has been suggested by my friend Fexrî Seker, a native of the village of Farê north of Diyarbakir. He is 38 years old as of this writing, and according to him the expression appeared only after he graduated from high school (ca. 2000). He has asked several members of the older generation in his village if they say Derbazbûyî be, and they do not. Instead they say any of the following:

Fexrî concludes that the younger generation has switched to Derbazbûyî be under Turkish influence, and he has several other examples of this phenomenon to support his assertion.2 More research is required on this before a definitive statement can be made.

2. Another expression which at first blush appears to be borrowed from Turkish is the following:

Once again, if this expression existed only in these two languages, one could claim that Çi heye, çi t’une? was borrowed from Turkish into Kurmanji. However, this expression also exists in Sorani, Zaza, Armenian, Neo-Aramaic [Modern Syriac] and Iraqi Arabic:

As with the previous expression (Derbazbûyî be), this one is also found in a number of languages of the Ottoman Empire. While some Kurmanji speakers suspect that this is a Turkish borrowing, it is popular among Sorani-speaking Kurds as well. The Sorani native speakers that I consulted did not find the expression objectionable. They live in areas where the dominant languages are Arabic [Iraq] and Persian [Iran]. The largest group of Kurmanji speakers, on the other hand, live in Turkey, although Kurmanji is also spoken in Syria, Iraq and Iran.

In point of fact, we cannot say that either of these two expressions originated in Turkish; it is possible that the Greeks or Armenians or Kurds were using them before the arrival of the Turks in the region, and that the Turks borrowed them from their new neighbors.

3. Our next example is an extremely old saying which is shared by several modern languages, but which we now know from recent research has a pedigree which goes back thousands of years before the common era.

The expression is: Ava bin kaê [=Water under the straw]. This expression also exists in Zaza, Persian, Turkish and Neo-Aramaic, and a similar expression can also be found in Arabic. When speaking of an insincere person, a trickster or a shyster, this saying can be used. Imagine that someone claims that he has a pit full of grain, which is covered with straw for protection. In reality, however, under the straw the pit is full of water, instead of grain. This saying appears in an Akkadian document from Mari on the Euphrates River in what is now Syria. It dates from 2,000 years BCE (Römer 1971:21–2, #80).

Two Kurdish sources from the Soviet period define the expression Ava bin kaê as follows: trickster, bastard, devil; untrustworthy, unreliable; traitor, deceitful, treacherous (Khamoian 1979:30 A-20; Dzhalilov & Dzhalilov 1972:71, #180).