Küresünni Erotic

The Küresünni are defined, more than anything, by contrast with their neighbors. They are Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims scattered through the highlands of Tunceli, Erzincan, Bingöl and Elazığ, in a part of eastern Anatolia where most of the surrounding population speaks Zazaki or Kurmanji and follows Alevism. In a region routinely described from the outside as uniformly Alevi and Kurdish, the Küresünni are the exception that complicates the map, and they are well aware of it. Villages are still identified locally by which side of that line they sit on, and marriage patterns, mosque attendance and the shape of the religious year have long run along the same boundary. The country itself is rough: the upper Euphrates and Murat valleys, steep pasture, winters that close the roads. Their Turkish belongs to the Oghuz branch of Turkic, but the local speech carries eastern Anatolian dialect features that set it apart from the Istanbul standard, and it has taken on vocabulary from centuries of living alongside Zazaki and Kurmanji speakers.

Where they came from is genuinely argued over. Most accounts trace them to Turkmen groups that moved into or were settled in the region during the medieval centuries, under the Seljuks or later under the Karakoyunlu and Akkoyunlu confederations. Others suspect a more mixed ancestry, with local families gradually absorbed into a Turkish-speaking Sunni identity. The documentary evidence is thin enough that both readings survive. Religious practice is mostly Hanafi and, in the villages, unshowy: the mosque, the fast, the funeral, without much ceremony around any of it. The twentieth century pressed hard on the region, and the Keban dam, finished in the 1970s, drowned a long stretch of riverside around Pertek and Çemişgezek, taking farmland and settlements with it and pushing families toward Elazığ, Istanbul and, for many, Germany. What remains in the countryside is older and thinner than it was. The identity has not dissolved with the move, though. Küresünni families in the cities still name the specific village they come from, and the label itself, worn plainly by some and treated by others as an outsider's tag they would rather answer with simply Turk, still does real work in conversations about who belongs where.