At Urfa I made the acquaintance of three characters, samples of the curious results of the shattering of races and medley of their remnants which has taken place over western Asia. I had noticed two or three times on my way from Aleppo another carriage with three occupants, and at Urfa found them occupying the room next to mine. Their appearance was remarkable. The eldest and leader of the party was a sinister-looking man, with a big hooked nose, and a huge mouth which opened at one corner to display the only two teeth he possessed. Upon his head he wore a turban, and an old overcoat and Turkish trousers, extremely baggy in the leg and tight at the ankles, completed his visible attire.
The next in importance was a Kurdish-looking fellow, dark, but with a humorous twinkle in his little eyes. The headgear was Kurdish too, the style affected by the northern races. A felt basin cap wound round with a blue cloth is the head-dress of these people. He had adopted the peculiar form of head handkerchief usual among the mountain Chaldeans; that is, instead of making a regular turban, he rolled his cloth till it made a thick rope, and then twisted it round his felt cap three or four times. He wore also the hairy Kurdish zouave jacket and wide trousers. In fact, to the experienced eye he appeared a Kurd of the Erzeroum district. The third of this trinity was all that the others were not—absurdly fat, his hairless face formed a grinning moon under his tiny fez. As coat he wore a garment reaching a little below his waist, made of shot blue silk, and the bagginess of the upper end of his trousers exaggerated his already ample breadth to the point of ludicrousness.
These queer creatures, when in their carriage, spent a great part of their time chanting in Gregorian tones in a language neither I nor the coachman could make out. Now and then they would sing a Kurdish song or a little doggerel in Turkish. Their conversation was carried on in Arabic and Kurdish, which two of them spoke equally well; only the middle man, who appeared so Kurdish, confined himself to that language. At night, now, in the caravanserai, I had a chance of listening to the crew, and heard them talk in the Kurdish called Kermanji, in Arabic, in Turkish, and then in this dialect of theirs which contained a good many Kurdish words. This was distinctly tantalising, and next morning I made the acquaintance of the one I set down as pure Kurd. He was very hearty; we spoke in Kurdish, and I found that they had already ascertained from my driver that I was a southern Kurdish Haji. I now learned that they, too, were returning from Mecca, and were natives of Sert, a small town south of Lake Van. No sooner had I heard this than the secret of their dialect was out. I remembered tales the Chaldeans of Urumia and Dilman in Persia tell of the mysterious “Gavarnai,” who come from inaccessible passes among the Kurdish mountains, Gavarnai calling themselves Christian, but often fleeing from Gavarnai who were Musulman. The solution of the Gavarnai question is as follows:—
MYSTERIOUS COMPANIONS
The district of Sert and the Gavar (or rock) district of Kurdistan is one of the most inaccessible of the many sealed corners of this mountain country, and it was here that the descendants of the Chaldeans and Assyrians fled before the hordes of the Tatars in the early fifteenth century, finding an asylum among the Kurdish tribes.
Here in the beautiful valleys of Sert they settled, and many became Musulman among the Kurds. Others fled from Sert before the blood-feuds of their own kinsmen, who gradually learned from the Kurds a hardy recklessness and bravery unknown of their ancestors of the towns and plains, and pushed farther into the mountains.
In quite recent times the village of Khusrava, now a considerable town, was founded by a Chaldean fugitive or explorer from the Sert valleys, named Nicolai, about 1780.
This statement I put here upon the authority of a native of Khusrava, and leave it as it stands, not without remark, however, that the neighbouring town of Salmas was in pre-Muhammadan days a Chaldean bishopric, where there were undoubtedly a large number of Chaldeans among—but not intermarried—with the Armenians of that region.
The language of these Assyrians, sometimes called Neo-Syriac, or Aramaic, has remained and is spoken, though now known as a language of the Christians, by a great part of the sedentary Musulman population of the Sert plain, who, though calling themselves Kurds, are of Chaldean descent.
Such were two of my new acquaintances, the eldest and youngest. My particular friend, though he knew the dialect, came from a hill village, and besides proving his Kurdish origin also carried further proof in his appearance and manners. We became very good friends, and made many excursions about the bazaars of Urfa together, his tongue, always ready for badinage in any of four languages, assuring him a welcome everywhere.