Khorasani Kurds Erotic

The Kurds of Khorasan are there because a border needed guarding. Mostly under the Safavid shah Abbas I, around the turn of the seventeenth century, Kurdish tribes were moved from the western edge of the empire to its far northeast. They were settled in the valleys between Mashhad and the Turkmen steppe to hold the frontier against Uzbek and Turkmen raids. Four centuries later their descendants still live in the towns and villages around Quchan, Shirvan, Faruj, Bojnord and Esfarayen, more than a thousand kilometers from the mountains most people picture when they hear the word Kurd. They speak Kurmanji, the Northern Kurdish of Turkey and Syria. Most of Iran's Kurdish west speaks Sorani or Southern Kurdish instead. Long separation has given Khorasani Kurmanji its own accent and a heavy layer of Persian and Turkic vocabulary, and most speakers switch easily into Persian. Religion is the other break with Kurmanji speakers to the west. Where the Kurds of Anatolia are largely Sunni, Khorasani Kurds are Twelver Shia, and the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, the region's great pilgrimage site, is close at hand.

For most of their history the frontier Kurds were organized by tribe. The Zafaranlu confederation dominated Quchan and the Shadlu held Bojnord. Their hereditary khans ran those districts as near-independent lordships into the early twentieth century, when the centralizing Pahlavi state reined them in. The region's tribal politics left one famous mark on Iranian history: in 1747 Nader Shah was assassinated at his camp near Quchan while marching against rebellious Kurds. Some families later crossed north, and part of Turkmenistan's small Kurdish population traces back to them. Herding flocks between summer and winter pastures has largely given way to farming and town work, though weddings still bring out bright layered dresses and long circle dances. The tradition that travels furthest is music. Kurdish bakhshis, the dotar-playing bards of northern Khorasan, perform epics and love songs in Kurmanji as well as Turkic and Persian. Their art is part of the regional tradition UNESCO recognized in 2010 as the music of the bakhshis of Khorasan.