We had one of our best single days in Diyarbakır, thanks to the gen­er­os­ity and eager­ness of one man to share his city and culture with two total strangers. We met Muzaffer while walking down the street, in what seemed at first like just another friendly “where are you from?”

It’s a common enough thing for strangers to stop us on the street and ask. It’s also a part of most of our com­mer­cial trans­ac­tions, as normal as making change or leaving a Lira or two as a tip. “Where are you from?”

“Canada,” we’ll say, and usually it ends there. Sometimes someone might go out on a limb, testing their know­ledge of geo­graphy. “Toronto?” they might ask, hes­it­antly. “Vancouver?” Almost no one has ever heard of Calgary.

So when Muzaffer stopped us, we assumed the exchange would be along those lines. Instead we found ourselves deep in con­ver­sa­tion, talking reli­gion, polit­ics, learn­ing some Kurdish words, and with an invit­a­tion to join Muzaffer on a visit to the local com­munity centre.

As the unof­fi­cial capital of Kurdistan, Diyarbakır is a con­flic­ted place in many ways. The pop­u­la­tion is almost entirely Kurdish, and there are strong feel­ings of dis­con­tent with the way Turkey has treated this region and its people. Kurdish nation­al­ist sen­ti­ment is extremely strong and wide­spread, in a way that only sup­pressed nation­al­ist move­ments tend to be. Traveling in Western Turkey, we saw news­casts in vir­tu­ally every city depict­ing Diyarbakır and other cities in the east as places con­stantly on the brink of riots, with dra­matic stock footage of clashes between police and pro­test­ers backed up with a musical score that would make Hollywood proud. These news­casts super­im­pose these images with flash­ing banner text that decries the “Terrorism” of the Kurds and often cut to shots of sol­diers’ funer­als. Based on talking to people in the western part of the country, these sen­sa­tion­al­ist news reports are very good at doing what they’re designed to do: gen­er­ate fear. Fear of ter­ror­ism, fear of the Kurds, fear of the breakup of Turkey. Over 30 Turkish sol­diers have been killed in the fight­ing in recent months.

I won’t claim to be an expert on this situ­ation, or all of the his­tor­ical causes, or who’s right and who’s wrong on any given issue, but I do know that the Kurds have as legit­im­ate a claim to autonomy as any other ethnic group, and that Turkey’s efforts at assim­il­a­tion and sup­pres­sion of Kurdish nation­al­ism and Kurdish culture have often been brutal. The Twentieth Century saw a long­stand­ing guer­illa war between Kurdish sep­ar­at­ists and the Turkish mil­it­ary. Executions and atro­cit­ies were carried out on both sides, and a guer­illa war is still being waged in south­east­ern Turkey. Collective pun­ish­ments have been com­mon­place, includ­ing with­hold­ing much needed funding for eco­nomic and com­munity devel­op­ment. For years the Turkish gov­ern­ment banned Kurdish lan­guage and even forbade naming chil­dren with Kurdish names. Even the name of the city is con­tested: offi­cially it is Diyarbakır, but to every Kurd within it, is known by its Kurdish name, Amed.

So perhaps Muzaffer’s hos­pit­al­ity is one way for him to defend the her­it­age he and all Kurds hold so dear. Aside from just being a good guy (which he cer­tainly is), showing for­eign­ers around his city is a way to show off its Kurdish roots. It is an expli­cit acknow­ledg­ment that Kurdish culture is unique and dis­tinct; Kurdish hos­pit­al­ity sincere and genuine. For us it was both fas­cin­at­ing and enjoy­able, to see Amed through local eyes. We saw live music in both newer and older tra­di­tions, toured some of the city’s 6km of old walls, and enjoyed dinner, tea and plenty of con­ver­sa­tion before capping the night with a few riddles. Thanks again Muzaffer!