KURDISH ORAL TRADITION AS A ‘HISTORIOLOGICAL’ COUNTER-NARRATIVE This paper aims to analyze Kurdish oral traditions with a specific attention to various songs and lamentations composed about Kurdish social and political leaders from the late Ottoman Empire through the early decades of the Turkish Republic. The broader observation that I will make in this paper is twofold: firstly, through a literature review of the works on Kurdish oral tradition, I will demonstrate that Kurdish oral tradition served the reproduction and transmission of the culture and language of the Kurdish population of the country. The second observation is that in the standardized and ‘teleological’ accounts of the modernization process from the late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, the Kurdish periphery has been perceived as a ‘reactionary-religious, tribal, backward’ site against the modernizing and ‘civilizing’ center. Against the anachronistic and teleological historical narrative of the center of the country, on the other hand, the Kurdish periphery has produced its own counter-narrative in the form of oral tradition. Through a textual analysis of various songs and lamentations on Kurdish tribal leaders (mîr), Sheikh Said and Ferzende Beg, which have been circulating among the Kurds, I will argue that in stark contrast to the prevalent assertions in the Turkish official historiography that these figures were a ‘problem’; Kurdish ‘historiology’, to borrow Jan Vansina’s term, as instantiated by a number of songs and lamentations, provided the Kurds with their own version of historical narrative and consciousness. Therefore, the Kurds have perceived and represented their social and political leaders such as sheikhs and tribal leaders as heroes unlike their official Turkish representations as backward religious and tribal figures.