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From @dougielombax & compiled by @azhdakha: Assyrians & Yazidis
West Sahara conflict
Last Updated: Feb. 19th, 2024 (If I missed smth before this, feel free to @ me to add it)
Ավելուկ ("aveluk") is one of the local Armenian names of a group of plants in the Rumex genus: curly dock (Rumex crispus), broad-leaved dock (R. obtusifolius), common sorrel (R. acetosa), and possibly patience dock (R. patientia).
Aveluk grows wild in humid areas of Armenia: on riverbanks, on the bases of mountains, on roadsides, and in meadows. It is foraged extensively during the spring, and eaten in large quantities throughout the year by ethnic Armenians, Greek Armenians, and Yazidi Armenians. Amongst Christians, it is especially popular during Lent ("Մեծ Պահք," "mec pahk'," or "great fast")—a forty-day-period of reflection, repentence, and abstention from meat, dairy, and eggs.
To Greek Armenians—mostly descended from Pontic Greeks, who settled in the Pontus region beginning in the 7th century BCE—these docks are called "aveluk," or "avluk."
Yazidis—an ethnoreligious group native to Kurdistan, whose religion has its roots in pre-Zorastrian Iranian paganism—call these plants "tirşo" (from Kurdish "tirş," meaning "sour"). Many Yazidis migrated to current-day Armenia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, due to religious persecution during the reign of Ottoman ruler Abdul Hamid II: today, they form the largest minority group in Armenia.
Common dishes made from this group of plants include a salad of boiled aveluk, garlic, walnuts, and spices; a stir-fry of aveluk and eggs; and a soup (ճաշ, "chash") of aveluk and cracked wheat berries. According to a 2020 survey, this soup is especially common amongst ethnic Armenians and Yazidis, but is also eaten by Greek Armenians. All three of these groups preserve aveluk for eating during the winter by drying it. Yazidis also have a preservation method exclusive to themselves: namely, lacto-fermentation (pickling in brine).
Foraging culture
Braids of aveluk, usually gathered and preserved by women, are sometimes sold in marketplaces. The dock plants themselves, however, are considered as a kind of commons, which anybody can gather as needed. Foraging thus unites concepts of communal ownership, generational knowledge, connection to land, and food sovereignty.
Armenian interdisciplinary performance artist Arpi Balyan writes:
Encouraging the use of Aveluk for nutritional and medicinal purposes is a great example of how food can be sourced without harming nature while preserving local and folk culinary and healing practices, remaining independent from the capitalist market.
By cooking aveluk chash, Balyan hopes to "strengthen our connection with familiar and unfamiliar food and to exchange local knowledge on nourishment and well-being with other communities." Aveluk is a particularly useful starting point for a pedagogical project of this sort, as Rumex plants grow across broad swathes of the Americas, Europe, Asia, North and South Africa, and Australia. Thus—perhaps paradoxically—people in many different parts of the world can experience their own local landscapes in new ways, thanks to engagement with a particular regional cuisine.
Aveluk chash
The aveluk leaves used to make aveluk soup are woven into characteristic long braids, and then dried. The drying process allows the leaves to ferment slightly, changing their strongly bitter flavor into a mildly, pleasantly sour one, with notes of pepper and fruit.
To make the soup, the dried braid is cut apart and rehydrated with boiled water. Cracked wheat berries (ձավար; "javar"), lentils, and potato may be added, in which case they will be boiled alongside the rehydrated aveluk until tender. A temper of fried onion, garlic, black pepper, and paprika (կարմիր պղպեղ, literally "red pepper") is then added and mixed in with the boiled ingredients. (Sometimes a one-pot version is made, in which case the aromatics will be fried in a pot, and then the other ingredients and water will be added.) The finished soup is garnished with chopped or crushed walnuts, and minced garlic.
The result is a hearty bowl of earthy lentils and tart, tender sorrel, rounded off with the slight nutty bitterness of walnuts, and the sharp zestiness of raw garlic.
[ID: A close-up of a dried, coiled aveluk braid. End ID]
Recipe under the cut!
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Ingredients:
30g dried curly dock (Ավելուկ; "aveluk")
100g cracked wheat (ձավար; "javar")
50g brown lentils (optional)
1 yellow onion, diced
1 cubed potato (optional)
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 Tbsp flour (optional)
Black pepper, to taste
1 tsp paprika (կարմիր պղպեղ)
Salt, to taste
2 Tbsp margarine, to fry
Walnut and minced garlic, to garnish
To make the aveluk braid:
1. Wash and thoroughly dry the dock leaves. I found it helpful to sort them into three or four different groups based on their length: start from the longest leaves and work towards the shortest.
2. Gather six 'stems' together and bind them with a piece of kitchen twine. Separate them into three 'strands' of two leaves each, and start braiding in a normal three-strand braid (i.e. by alternately crossing the leftmost and rightmost leaf over into the middle.
Note: You'll want to keep the braid as tight as possible. 'Folding' each leaf over as you braid it, so that the opposite surface is on top each time, will help keep the braid neat.
3. As each 'strand' starts to get too short to continue braiding, bring in another leaf and hold it together with that strand; continue braiding until the braid itself holds the new leaf in place. This is the same technique used when French-braiding hair.
4. Repeat until your leaves are used up, and bind off the end.
5. Hang the braid up out of direct sunlight to dry. A windy area, such as by a window or in front of a fan, is best to dry the braid quickly and retain its color.
To make the soup:
1. Cut the aveluk braid into 2-inch long pieces with a pair of kitchen scissors.
2. Soak aveluk in just-boiled water, covered, for 15 minutes. Drain and discard the water. Thinly slice aveluk with a kitchen knife.
3. Add wheat, lentils, and potato to a large soup pot with enough water to cover. Simmer, covered, for about 10 minutes.
4. Add aveluk and simmer for another 10 minutes, until softened.
5. Meanwhile, ladle a bit of broth into a small bowl and add flour. Whisk to combine, then pour the mixture back into the soup pot.
6. Make the temper. Melt margarine on medium heat in a skillet. Add onion and fry until browned, about 8 minutes.
7. Add black pepper, paprika, and chopped garlic to the pan. Fry for about 30 seconds, until garlic no longer smells raw.
8. Pour temper into the soup and stir to combine. Simmer for 5 minutes to allow flavors to meld.
9. Top with chopped walnuts and minced garlic. Serve warm.
in the yazidi religion, god lives in the nineveh plains' lalish valley, the meeting point between earth and heaven. lalish is the place yazidi face when praying, a place yazidi are expected to make a pilgrimage to at least once in their lifetimes, and the site of many yazidi sacred places. most notable are several tombs and surrounding sanctuaries, and kanîya spî (white spring), a baptistry where children are baptized to be initiated into the religion. click on the alt text to learn more about the sites.
there are no inscriptions on most of these buildings, and there's no particular architectural styles associated with different periods of yazidi history, so the buildings are difficult to date. what is known is that the valley has been inhabited for some 4,000 years. the yazidi ethnoreligion is thought to be just as old.
The morning of August 3, 2014 began like every other morning in Kocho.
Then the trucks arrived.
Nadia Murad was 21 years old, living in a small farming village of about 1,700 people in northern Iraq. She was Yazidi, a member of one of the oldest religious minorities on earth, a community that had survived centuries of persecution and still held onto its language, its traditions, and its land in the hills of Sinjar.
ISIS had decided they would not survive this.
The men of Kocho were separated first. Nadia's six brothers were marched to the edge of the village. Her mother was taken with the older women. They were led away together. Her mother did not come home. The younger women and girls were loaded onto buses. They had been given a designation in ISIS doctrine: sabaya. A word that meant they were now property.
Over the next three months, Nadia was bought and sold seven times. She was beaten, burned, and subjected to violence that left her repeatedly unconscious. When she tried to escape and was caught, the punishment was severe. She tried again anyway.
In November 2014, she found a door that had been left unlocked. She ran into the night with no plan, no money, and no certainty of anything except that she could not stay. A Muslim family in the neighborhood took the extraordinary risk of hiding her. They could have been killed for it. They did it anyway. Through a quiet network of people who refused to look away, Nadia eventually reached a refugee camp, then Germany, then safety.
She was free.
And now she had to decide what to do with that freedom.
She could have disappeared into a quiet life. No one would have blamed her. Nadia chose differently.
In December 2015, she walked into the United Nations Security Council chamber. She was 22 years old, speaking in Arabic to a room of presidents, ministers, and ambassadors. She did not use diplomatic language or careful abstractions. She named what had been done, in detail, without euphemism. She described being selected like livestock. She spoke about the youngest victims, girls as young as nine years old. She spoke for twenty minutes. When she finished, the chamber was silent.
That silence rippled outward. In 2016, the United Nations formally recognized what had been done to the Yazidis as genocide. Nadia co-founded Nadia's Initiative, an organization working to rebuild water systems, schools, and clinics in the ruins of Sinjar, giving survivors not just recognition but something to come back to.
In 2018, at 25 years old, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iraqi in history to receive it. At the ceremony in Oslo, she did not celebrate. She stood at the podium and reminded every leader in that room that thousands of Yazidi women and children were still missing. Still captive. Still waiting. She used the most prestigious peace prize on earth as a platform for those who had no voice left.
Nadia Murad is 32 years old today.
She is still speaking. Still demanding. Still refusing to let the world forget that a village called Kocho existed, and that the people who were taken from it had names, and families, and lives that mattered.
