Yasin Aziz

Dum Dum Castle by Yasin Aziz: A 17th Century Historical Novel in Kurdistan, A Kurdish tribe built a castle, fought back the Persian Safavid and Otto

There is a well-documented historical account of a long battle in 1609-10 between Kurds and the Safavid Empire. The battle took place around a fortress called Dimdim, located in the Beradost region, near Lake Urmia in north-western Iran. In 1609, the ruined structure was rebuilt by Em r Xan Lepz r n (Golden Hand Khan), ruler of Beradost, who sought to maintain the independence of his expanding principality in the face of both Ottoman and Safavid penetration into the region. Rebuilding Dimdim was considered a move towards independence that could threaten Safavid power in the northwest. Many Kurds, including the rulers of Mukriyan (Mahabad), rallied around Amir Khan. After a long and bloody siege led by the Safavid grand vizier Hatem Beg, which lasted from November 1609 to the summer of 1610, Dimdim was captured. All the defenders were massacred. Shah Abbas ordered a general massacre in Beradost, and Mukriyan (reported by Eskandar Beg Turkoman, Safavid historian, in the book Alam Aray-e Abbasi) resettled the Turkish Afshar tribe in the region while deporting many Kurdish tribes to Khorasan. Although Persian historians (like Eskandar Beg) depicted the first battle of Dimdim as a result of Kurdish mutiny or treason, in Kurdish oral traditions (Beyt dimdim), literary works (Dzhalilov, pp 67-72) and histories, it was treated as a struggle of the Kurdish people against foreign domination. In fact, Beyt dimdim is considered a national epic second only to Mem Z n by Ahmad Khani. The first literary account of the Dimdim battle was written by Faqi Tayran