Kurdish delight

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.

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Kurdish delight

“Black are the walls and black are the hearts of black Diyabakir.” It’s an ominous proverb. Yet, arriving late at night in this 9,000-year-old city on the bank of the Tigris, only two-thirds of it proved true. Diyabakir is indeed built of black volcanic basalt, and its walls are dauntingly massive. At 8 metres high and nearly four miles in circumference, they are the second longest in the world after the Great Wall of China, but the black hearts were nowhere in evidence. 

After serving tea in our hotel, a converted 13th-century caravanserai, our waiter insisted on personally escorting me and my daughter to his favourite kebab joint deep in the alleys of the copper market for a 2am snack. 

No plates, cutlery, glasses or much of a table — in Diyabakir you dine at long benches before a narrow firepit, surrounded by charcoal smoke and the popping of cığer kebabı, skewers of liver which are dipped into a fiendish hot sauce, slapped on the grill then flipped expertly into thin sheets of fresh bread stuffed with luminous preserved vegetables. To drink, șalgam, the Coke of Mesopotamia, made from fermented purple carrots and turnip. 

Other diners clustered round, asking questions, pressing more delicious food on us and taking snaps for social media. 

It turned into quite the riotous welcome — we finally got to sleep around five, to the sound of the call to prayer from the Great Mosque, full of pickles and a sense of real adventure.

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Diyabakir’s history has been fraught and tumultuous, but many of its ancient traditions have endured. The House of the Dengbej is a graceful 18th-century mansion deep in the old city, where each day several of the city’s dengbejan — storytellers — gather to recite. The artists work within a 5000-year-old tradition of oral Kurdish poetry, adapting the forms and characters of the stories to incorporate current affairs. Using their own bodies as instruments, they carry the narratives between them, improvising like jazz musicians. 

Visitors can call informally to the divanhane to listen for a few minutes or an afternoon, and the diversity of the audience, from businessmen to children on their way home from school, emphasised that dengbej is very much not a museum piece. Despite our not having a word of Kurdish, the performance was thrilling: haunting, dignified, utterly mesmeric. 

Well of history 

I was shamefully ignorant about Syriac culture until my daughter suggested I accompany her to the Turkish border on a research trip, but, at the Mor Gabriel monastery near Midyat, I discovered I have a piece of early Christian history in my garden in Venice. 

I’d never paid much attention to the well, except worrying that my cats might fall down it, until a historian from Ca’Foscari university asked if he could photograph it. He explained that the carved peacocks in the well’s stone panel dated it to the Byzantine era, whilst two doleful-faced lions at the base were likely later carvings of the emblem of Saint Mark. 

However, when I spotted a similar lion at Mor Gabriel, the abbot explained that from the second century AD the lion was used in Syriac Christian iconography as a symbol of Christ’s mercy: as the lion’s tail erases its tracks, so Christ wipes clean the sins of man. Venetian buildings are full of fragments of ancient carvings from repurposed ruins on the mainland, but Syriac designs are quite unusual. So now I live with a celebrity well, a wondrous link with one of the most captivating places I have ever visited. 

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That architecture, like food, remains tangible evidence of the dynamic cosmopolitanism of the ancient world is one of the themes of Christopher Garis’s new book, Inside Sicily. At the launch in Milan, Christopher discussed the Greek, Arab, Berber, Norman and Spanish influences which combine in the Sicilian Baroque. 

The book collates lavish, intricate and eclectic private houses, from the seaswept sparseness of designer Ettore Sottsass’s home on the Aeolian island of Filicudi to the dazzlingly ornate Palazzo Biscari in Catania, whose collection of antiquities amazed Goethe and Casa Cuseni in Taormina where the English painter Robert Kitson hosted D.H. Lawrence. 

Intimate, scholarly and visually gorgeous, it’s a private tour through Sicily’s multi-layered romanticism. 

The homecoming queen

“Idiotic” and “not art” was the verdict of James Manson, the director of the Tate Gallery, when confronted with a shipment of sculptures including Brancusi’s Sculpture for the Blind destined for exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery on Cork Street in 1938. Artworks were exempt from customs duty, but Manson’s judgement meant that Peggy had to pay up. 

“The London public is apathetic to modern art,” she wrote despairingly, but it was her vision which not only prevailed, but came to dominate the taste of the 20th century. 

Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector, which previewed in Venice and will travel to the Royal Academy this November, is a tribute to the pivotal role played by Peggy’s London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, which staged more than 20 shows in 1938 and 1939. 

Cocteau, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Hepworth and Taeuber-Arp are amongst the artists Peggy championed and the show, curated by Gražina Subelytė and Simon Grant attests to both her courage and the extraordinary clarity of her judgement. 

Gore Vidal summed up Peggy’s character perfectly as “the last of Henry James’s transatlantic heroines — Daisy Miller with rather more balls”. In her catalogue essay, Subelytė reveals just how ballsy she had to be in the face of conservative (male) critics who preferred sneering to seeing. 

The show reunites many works which have not been displayed together for nearly a century, amongst them Kandinsky’s Green Figure, a graphic psychedelic which prefigures the art of another revolutionary moment in London’s history, the Sixties. 

Although she spent her last years in Venice, Peggy never lost her affinity with England; the London show will be a homecoming.