In Kurdistan, the moutains have the faces of the gods and the kings who inhabited them, as the carved giants of Nemrud Dagh, or the legance of the Hasankeyf citadel. Here we couldn't know that is moutain or that is sculpture, gods' or princes's works. Stones in nature, often in desert lands, are like these tombs of any periods, erected on all the shore of Van Lake, round or conical monuments within lied Armenians, Kurds and Turkmens. 

On the mosques and the ciltadels abound a bestiary of fantasy : lions and dragons, chimeres, sphinges, among vases flooding from the oldest Mesopotamian past and trees of life, remind to our memories that the Garden of Eden was created here, between the Tigris and the Euphrat, and that Abraham borned not far from Urfa, in that is still visited as the oldest village of the world.

Christian legends, Muslim legends ? All of them interlace and sometime opposite each others. Then, Mount Ararat would shelter the Arch of Noah, but Mount Judi too. Behind the People of the Book's religions (Christians, Jews, Muslims), appeared more ancient cults as the Sabeans of Upper-Mesopotamia who used still the calendar of Babylon, or the Kurdish Yezidis, the descendants of Mazdeans.

The palaces of Bitlis and Dogubeyazit, the Hoshab castle, showed still the magnificences of Kurdish princes, of their power until the 19th century, singed by troubadours, or stranbêj. And then, humbler but more glorious, the mausoleums of two great Kurdish poets, who song Love and Wine, the extasis of Mystics and the Love of Beauties : Ahmedê Khanî is near to Ishak Pasha's palace and Malayê Jazirî is in the city of Cizre that shelters too Noah's tomb.

Sandrine Alexie - Manager of the exhibition