Abstract
The political developments in the Middle East during the 1990s added a global dimension to the Kurdish question, which is having an appreciable effect on the ethnic self-awareness of the Kurds living in Georgia, the absolute majority of whom are Yezidis.
References
About the Kurdish migrations in the Southern Caucasus (Georgia included), see: D. Pirbari, “Kurdy na Iuzhnom Kavka ze,” Vostok i Kavkaz (Tbilisi), No. 2, 2002; Pir Dima, “Ezidy na Iuzhnom Kavkaze,” Novy vzgliad, No. 1, February 2003.
See: V. Djaoshvili, Population of Georgia in the 18th-20th Centuries, Tbilisi, 1984, p. 213 (in Georgian).
See: The State Department of Statistics of Georgia. Results of the First National General Population Census of Georgia, Vol. I, Tbilisi, 2003, p. 100 (in Georgian).
The Muslim Kurds were deported from Georgia to Central Asia in 1944 as one of the unreliable Muslim population groups living along the Turkish border; in this way Georgia lost nearly all its Kurds. (In the 1880s, there were about 3,000 Muslim Kurds in the Tbilisi Gubernia and about 1,000 in Ajaria.)
See: Pir Dima, Na puti k istine. Ezidizm, Tbilisi, 2003, p. 4.
The problem of literacy was resolved, to a certain extent, in the Soviet Union, yet some Yezidi Kurds remained illiterate. For more detail, see: D. Pirbari, “Ezidskoe pis’mo,” Etnologicheskiy sbornik Kavkaza, Tbilisi, No. VIII, 2003, pp. 199-202.
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