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    Categories: 2023

In Pictures: Why Yazidi herders still traverse Armenian mountains

Oct 13 2023

As the winter snow melts, Yazidi herders lead sheep and cattle to Armenia’s highest pastures. Shepherds and their families spend spring, summer, and early autumn in tents and mobile homes atop the Aragats and Gegham mountains. The journey is one of the last vestiges of a nomadic past.  

The largely Kurdish-speaking Yazidi people are Armenia’s largest minority. They have been persecuted in countries such as Iran and Iraq, including a 2014 Islamic State attack that killed thousands.

In Armenia, however, the Yazidi community has parliamentary representation, their own schools, and the freedom to practice their religion, which draws from ancient Iranian traditions and shares elements with Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The country has also become a haven in recent weeks for ethnic Armenian refugees fleeing instability in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in neighboring Azerbaijan. 

The shepherds begin each day with prayer, a tribute to the rising sun. As they guide their animals across the volcanic landscape, a subtle hierarchy emerges: wandering goats in the lead, followed by sheep, with Armenian Gampr dogs and a watchful shepherd bringing up the rear. Birds of prey, including golden eagles, scan the procession from distant rocks for a potential meal, though such opportunities are rare. 

At day’s end, the animals are corralled, and a table is set with simple but plentiful dishes: cheese, yogurt, vegetables, and often meat. The shepherds will rise again at dawn, repeating the cycle until the first snows of fall. 

View the pics at the link below:

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2023/1012/In-Pictures-Why-Yazidi-herders-still-traverse-Armenian-mountains

Emil Lazarian: “I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.” - WS