Smoking In The Garden

I need cigarettes - so I medicate with images of art and life from the smokiest of cultures and lands - the Middle East.


Photograph of three Kurdish jewish family members from the the small town of Rowndiz in the Kurdish mountains in northern Iraq, taken by a traveling missionary in 1905. The town was described by A.M.Hamilton [The narrative of an Engineer in Iraq,1930’s] “High on the steep and narrow slope and perched thus between two great precipices is the town of upper Rowndiz, [lower Rowndiz was burned by the Russians in 1915-16]. Rowndiz looks out on mountains on all sides. Jagged and irregular peaks, nearly all of them over eight thousand feet in height, snow-capped for six months of the year”. Some of the Kurdish Jews settled in the new and prosperous town of Qamishli in Syrian Mesopotamia post WW1, facing the ancient town of Nusibis [Nusaibin] on the Turkish side of the border. Qamishli possessed a train station on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, an aerodrome, and a Synagogue. Today, some 75.000 to 100.000 so called Kurdish Jews live in Israel.

Photograph of three Kurdish jewish family members from the the small town of Rowndiz in the Kurdish mountains in northern Iraq, taken by a traveling missionary in 1905. The town was described by A.M.Hamilton [The narrative of an Engineer in Iraq,1930’s] “High on the steep and narrow slope and perched thus between two great precipices is the town of upper Rowndiz, [lower Rowndiz was burned by the Russians in 1915-16]. Rowndiz looks out on mountains on all sides. Jagged and irregular peaks, nearly all of them over eight thousand feet in height, snow-capped for six months of the year”. Some of the Kurdish Jews settled in the new and prosperous town of Qamishli in Syrian Mesopotamia post WW1, facing the ancient town of Nusibis [Nusaibin] on the Turkish side of the border. Qamishli possessed a train station on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, an aerodrome, and a Synagogue. Today, some 75.000 to 100.000 so called Kurdish Jews live in Israel.

(Source: kurdistania)

1 year ago

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