Kurds in European Travel Diaries Kurdistan, a region stretched across Mesopotamia and straddling the Ottoman and the Persian territories has been visited by many European travelers and Christian missionaries, some of whom provide us with their travel accounts. Loosely classified, the European travelers to Kurdistan fall into three categories: the Christian missionary, the European adventurer anthropologist, and the modern entrepreneurially or academically motivated traveler. What almost all of these travelers saw and searched for was an ancient barbaric people protected by mountains from exposure to the outside world and therefore a people who belonged to distant past that needed to be discovered and described to the avaricious European readers. The missionaries, restricted in their perception and knowledge of the Kurds due to the concentration of their efforts on the Christian population of the region, tended to write mostly biased commentaries that often presented a hardened misconception of the Kurds as savage bandits in the mountains. Adventurer anthropologists such as Walter B. Harris in his From Batum to Baghdad provide a detailed account of the Kurdish customs, clothing, and various tribes. Even so, his great admiration for the native Arabs and Kurds in their native garb and his mockery of their adopted French or Persian garb reveal the popular Orientalist notion of searching for the noble savage. When he leaves Bana behind for Sakiz, a more urban town farther into the Persian territory, he regretfully says, “Here we found a class of people, debased in life, ideas, morality, aping the Persian in dress and character, and suffering hardships at the hands of the Persian Officialdom.” On the other hand is the entrepreneur or the academic who travels to a politically barricaded Kurdistan in the 20th century. An exemplary account is The Children of the Jinn (1980) by Margaret Kahn who traveled to Kurdistan to write a dissertation on Kurdish grammar. Unlike Harris, she readily admits her Orientalist preconceptions of the Kurds and resonates with Harris when saying she was in search of a people whose race was not tainted by the Persian, Turkish, or Arab blood. The images of the Kurds as wild bandits, noble savages, or the downtrodden are some of the common themes that run through most of the European travel diaries written about the Kurds. The European readership, the political agenda, and the search for the noble savage are among the issues I have explored in this study.