Seyda Goyan, a retired civil servant and researcher who lives in the Uludere district of Şırnak, wants to protect antique cultural items from his village and childhood home. To gather, protect, and present these cultural traces of the past for others to view, the Kurdish writer and researcher opened a museum of Kurdish cultural items in his home.

Goyan’s ethnographic museum houses hundreds of ancient works of Kurdish culture and art from the four Kurdistan regions, although most of the items belong to Turkish Kurdistan and the Şırnak region. While explaining the reason for his collection, the folklorist says that he wants Kurdish culture to always remain alive and be preserved and passed down from generation to generation.

Researcher becomes curator

Goyan’s two-roomed museum hold thousands of items that were on the verge of being lost or discarded. Starting out with a water jug, the collection has grown to include traditional clothes, rugs, carpets, doors, weapons, eating and drinking utensils, key chains, wool clipping tools, agricultural tools, dough troughs that are no longer used, sieves, jugs, granaries, baskets, and oil lamps, all of which are presented for the public to view.

Some of the items are over 500 years old, and Goyan provides information about them in seven different languages, including Kurdish, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, German and Turkish.

For years, Goyan traveled from village to village and city to city, collecting hundreds of Kurdish artifacts himself, purchasing many of them with his own means, taking them secretly or openly from acquaintances, or finding them in the garbage. While villagers made fun of him at first, after seeing the museum, they were amazed and quickly changed their minds.

Researcher and writer Seyda Goyan has thus created a museum that reflects Kurdish culture and customs. Housed in an old house on an old street where he was born, Goyan says he is ready to move the museum to another city in Kurdistan to allow more tourists and locals alike to visit and explore the past.

About Goyan

Seyda Goyan was born in 1965 in the Uludere district of Şırnak. He studied in Uludure from primary school through high school. He started his career as a civil servant in 1990 and retired in 2017. He made nearly twenty documentary films by transforming folkloric songs, epics, nursery rhymes, riddles, children's games, adult games, and the subject of nomadic life into an archive of photography, video, and text. Goyan also wrote five folkloric books. He is married and has four children.

Sevda Kaplan is a Dicle University Physical Education graduate who has been a journalist since 1993. With a background in presenting and TV reporting, she notably held a six-year term as vice president of the Journalists Association. Alongside her ongoing journalism career, she has authored two novels in the Kurdish language.