Stories from the Field

August 2003

Shamiram: Satan's village

Crossing the plains of western Armenia, fields of summer wildflowers carpet rolling hills. Far off to the west, the snow-capped Aragats Mountain crowns the horizon.

Nestled in this serene setting is Shamiram, the largest Kurdish village in Armenia with about 800 inhabitants and the geographical heart of Yezidi Kurd worship in Armenia. Here and elsewhere Yezidis worship Satan as the creator angel.

“Satan is our god, and Beelzebub is our king,” say the holy scriptures of Yezidism known as the Mishaf Resh or “Black Book,” which probably dates to the 13th century.

The pastoral summer scenes belie harsher realities here. Severe snows make survival difficult during winter months for the Yezidi Kurds who live in remote villages in Armenia and surrounding countries. In the same way, the villagers’ warm Kurdish hospitality veils their desperate spiritual reality.

A monument in the village draws Yezidis from throughout the country, making it second in importance only to their holiest city of Lalish in Iraq. Couples often marry at the monument, having their unions blessed by the sheik or demonic priest.

While the majority of the 30 million Kurds worldwide follow Sunni Islam, a small percentage did not convert to Islam in the seventh century, instead following the tenets of Yezidism. Numbering about 30,000 in Armenia, Yezidis principally worship Lucifer. He goes by the name of Malak Tawus and is known as the “peacock angel” or the “proud angel.” Yezidis believe Christ came to earth only as an angel in human form.

“The Yezidi people say God created many nations, and every nation God gave to angels,” explains “Milo,”* a Yezidi Kurd who is now a Christian pastor. “They believe He gave our nation to Satan. Our people believe if you don’t worship Satan, God will be angry with you. They say this is the will of God.”

The religion, which also uses the sun and serpents as symbols, has a strong cultural hold on Yezidi Kurds. Villagers regularly pay a tax to the sheik for him to perform various rituals such as weddings and funerals explains Porsu, a 73-year-old woman who has lived in Shamiram for 50 years. She reasons that she must pay so that the sheik will give her a proper burial when she dies.

Porsu, energetic though bent from years of hard work, opens her home to village visitors, sharing the little coffee that she has brewed into a strong concoction of sugar and fine grounds. Like most Yezidis, she has a “holy” place in her house. To the side of a back room in her simple stone house, she lifts a cloth that covers stacked doshaks, thick wool-filled quilts she has made by hand, offering prayers while she stitched them to imbue the quilts with special powers. She says she covers family members with these doshaks only when someone is ill. They contain healing powers.

Milo explains: “Every family must build one place for worshiping Satan, and every day they must pray to Satan.”

Elements of Yezidi teachings such as the origin of the world sound familiar, though twisted. Their creation story includes Adam and Eve, yet Adam interacts with Satan, who encourages him to eat wheat even though God forbids it. After Adam eats the grain, Satan evicts Adam from the garden.

“They profess that the devil is a creative agent of the supreme God, inasmuch as he produced evil. Hence he deserves adoration,” states the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.

The most important historical figure in Yezidism is Sheik Adi, who dates to the 12th or 13th century, whom they believe to be the reincarnation of Malak Tawus. Carvings on the monument in Shamiram depict the Iraqi city of Lalish where Sheik Adi is buried and to which Yezidis journey to worship.

Also carved into the monument is the bird image of Malak Tawus and an image of the Black Book. For centuries their religion forbade Yezidis, other than priests, to read. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union insisted that Kurdish children in Armenia attend school, though in present-day villages this often means schooling only through the eighth grade. Many older people remain nonliterate.

Yezidi Kurds speak the Kurmanji dialect, which is shared with about 13 million Kurds worldwide. They have a rich oral tradition, and they pass down their religion through stories, chants and songs, says “Craig,”* a Christian worker among the Yezidi Kurds.

Building on this oral tradition, Christian workers use Bible storying to teach Yezidi children biblical truths.

“We’re building the Bible within their hearts,” Craig explains. Last summer in a camp led by visiting college students working with an Armenian translator and evangelist, children in a village perched on the border of Armenia and Turkey learned 12 Bible stories along with music, sports and crafts over the course of three days.

“After the day was over, the children could stand and say word-for-word those Bible stories,” Craig recalls. On the final day in an assembly which included the village chief, the sheik (who allowed his three children to attend the Bible camp), the school director and parents of the children who attended, a child stood and retold the biblical story of creation and about Lucifer’s fall from heaven.

“I watched the sheik to see his reaction,” Craig mused. “It was hard to tell what he was thinking.”

In that same village, another Christian worker, “Samuel,”* attended a wedding celebration last year.

“A guy started singing this song at the wedding. He had a great voice, and we congratulated him afterwards. We found out later that he was the sheik of the village, and he was singing a song about how the Yezidi religion was the true religion and they shouldn’t listen to any foreigners. Obviously, he was singing about us,” Samuel recalls.

And yet even with spiritual opposition, the power of Christ is leading Yezidis to turn their back on Satan’s fiery throne.

Samuel, who with his wife, “Sarah,”* spent eight months witnessing in Kurdish villages as volunteers in 2001 and 2002, began recording testimonies of those Yezidis who have found Jesus Christ.

“God led us to a couple of different areas of the country and to some Kurdish believers—we just kind of stumbled on these believers and heard their testimonies, and they were awesome,” says Samuel. Putting the testimonies on cassette enables them to share Yezidi believers’ own testimonies in their heart language of Kurmanji Kurdish and with those who cannot read.

“The things we’re hearing about and the people we’re meeting makes us realize that it’s not about us,” says Samuel. “It’s about God.

“We know that He’s not done with these people.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities.