El Camino Kurdish | Premium ◆ |

The Spanish camino offers the Credencial (pilgrim’s passport), stamped at every stop. For Kurds, the "stamp" is the preservation of language. Historically, the Kurdish languages—Kurmanji, Sorani, Pehlewani, and Gorani—were banned in state schools in Turkey, Syria, and Iran for decades.

Thus, the El Camino Kurdish became a secret classroom. In the remote mezhe (villages), elders would teach poetry by Ahmad Khani or the revolutionary verses of Cigerxwîn in hushed tones. During the 1990s in Turkish Kurdistan, speaking Kurdish in public could lead to arrest. So, the pilgrimage moved underground. To speak Kurmanji was to walk the path. To sing a dengbêj (storytelling ballad) was to mark a waypoint.

The modern leg of this pilgrimage involves the diaspora. In Berlin, Paris, and London, second-generation Kurdish youth walk their own camino—learning a mother tongue in a foreign land, struggling against assimilation. They are the spiritual pilgrims, keeping the sound of the mountains alive in the concrete jungles of Europe.

No article on El Camino Kurdish would be complete without addressing the geopolitical pilgrims. The United States, the European Union, and Russia have all taken short walks on the Kurdish path—only to turn back when it became difficult.

The Kurds have been allies of convenience: to the US against ISIS in Syria, to the West against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to Israel as a counterweight to Iran. Yet, at every junction, the alliance dissolves. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led military, were abandoned by the US during the 2019 Turkish incursion. The Kurdish pilgrims learned a bitter lesson: on the world stage, their camino has no permanent sponsors. el camino kurdish

Thus, the political leg of this journey is marked by betrayal as a waypoint. For every victory—such as the autonomous administration in Rojava—there is a Turkish drone strike or an Iranian mortar. To walk the Kurdish camino is to trust no milestone, to know that the road ahead might be bulldozed by a superpower’s realpolitik.

In the shadow of the Camino de Santiago—a spiritual route of self-discovery in Western Europe—lies a different kind of pilgrimage. It is not a quest for a scallop shell or a cathedral, but a desperate, centuries-long search for a home. This is El Camino Kurdish: The road of the Kurds, one of the world’s largest stateless nations (30–40 million people), scattered across the rugged mountains where Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria converge.

On El Camino Kurdish, the backpack is not filled with hiking gear. It holds:

Kurdish regions have long been crossroads of civilizations, with diverse communities including Muslims, Yazidis, Christians, and Syriac Orthodox. Pilgrimage in Kurdish lands often blends religious devotion with cultural heritage, reflecting the area’s syncretic traditions. Unlike the single, well-defined Camino routes in Spain, Kurdish pilgrimage paths are fragmented yet profound, shaped by localized legends, ancestral ties, and the veneration of saints, mystics, and natural sites. To understand the Kurdish camino, one must first

To understand the Kurdish camino, one must first understand the land. The traditional Kurdish homeland, or Kurdistan, is a rugged, landlocked high country. It is defined by the Zagros and Taurus mountain ranges. For the Kurds, the mountains have been both a fortress and a grave.

Unlike the well-marked, cobblestone paths of northern Spain, the El Camino Kurdish is etched into rocky goat trails, minefields, and secret smuggling routes. Older generations recall the "Revend"—seasonal migrations where Kurdish nomads moved their herds from winter pastures (in modern-day Iraq) to summer pastures (in Turkey and Iran). These paths, used for millennia, became the arteries of a nation.

However, in the late 20th century, these paths transformed. Following the genocidal Anfal campaign in 1988, where Saddam Hussein’s regime destroyed over 4,000 Kurdish villages, the caminos became trails of death. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds walked for weeks through the mountains toward the Turkish and Iranian borders, carrying nothing but carpets and children. That is the haunting bedrock of the Kurdish way: forced displacement.

Several locations in Kurdish regions are pilgrimage sites, each with distinct narratives: Sinjar Mountains, Nineveh, Iraq