Lecture entitled "Kurds' History in Aleppo"

In order to introduce the history of the Kurdish presence in the city, the Aleppo Cultural Forum organized a lecture entitled "Kurds' History in Aleppo" in Sheikh Maksoud neighborhood, and it was attended by dozens of intellectuals and interested people.

The lecture was given by Dr. Farhad Nassan who first talked about the history of building the city, and said: "Aleppo, the oldest city in history, does not know its first builders, but it is believed that one of the Nineveh kings ordered to build it at the hand of Halab bin Mahr al-Omleiqi, about four thousand years BC. It witnessed the first devastation in the Akkadian era 2450 BC, then it witnessed expansion in the Amorite era and its king, Hammurabi."

Nassan added that Aleppo "was subjected to a great destruction by the Hittites, and then surrendered without resistance to the Assyrian king Shell Munsar in 853 BC, then the Persians occupied it, then the Macedonians occupied it, and Aleppo remained alive and did not die."

For the first time in the Hamdanids era, Aleppo has become the capital

On the Kurdish presence in Aleppo, Nassan mentioned that the Kurdish presence dates back to the time of the Hamdanids. "In this period, the Kurds have had affinity with the city of Aleppo for the first time, as the Emir of the Kurdish Dostakian state Abu Ali Hassen sent a group of his country’s supervisors to the city of Aleppo at its Prince Abi al-Fadhael bin Saad al-Dawla bin Saif al-Dawla al-Hamdani to be engaged to his sister."

Nassan added: "Aleppo was turned into a major building workshop, as they built the walls, the towers, and all the doors that we know today, and they built the two markets that were built east of the Great Mosque, transferred to one of them al-Hariris and to the other al-Nahassin.

He also says, "The historian Ibn Shaddad, in his book, The Serious Relationships on the Constructive Role of the Kurds in Aleppo, in terms of building schools, baths, mosques and other social facilities from the Ayyubid era, before and after it."

The Kurds had a great share

Nassan said: "As for mosques, the Kurds had a large share in building them. In the tenth century AD, there were only a number of mosques in Aleppo that did not exceed the four; one of them in al-Zahiriyah neighborhood, which is the neighborhood built by the Kurdish king Ghazi Ibn al-Sultan Saladin al-Ayyubi for his army from the Kurds and Turkmen when he opened the city of Aleppo."

It was also stated in the lecture that the first Kurdish printing press brought by Hozni Mukriyan from Germany to al-Akrad (the Kurds) neighborhood in Aleppo and the press is preserved to this day in the Rawanduz Museum. Nassan says: "In 1915, at the age of 22, Hussein Hozni traveled to Germany, where he bought from Berlin an Arab printing machine and transported it to Aleppo, as he himself made molds and minting of Kurdish letters not found in Arabic (پ، ڤ، ژ، گ، چـ ) to consist with the Kurdish alphabet written in Arabic letters, and he began printing Kurdish books, newspapers, and magazines."

At the end of his speech, he pointed out that in the twentieth century, the Kurds lived extensively in various neighborhoods of Aleppo. At the beginning of the century they lived in the Kurdish neighborhood of Aghiol, al-Neirab neighborhood and Tel Aran neighborhood east of Aleppo, most of its residents were Kurds. Then the Kurds transferred to live in the newly emerging neighborhoods since 1935, such as al-Ashrafieh, al-Sheikh Maksoud, al-Suryan and other neighborhoods.

D.H