Category
wedding
A Kurdish wedding lasts not one day but three. It opens with the henna evening on Thursday at the bride's home, where the women gather to paint her hands and feet with henna and sing the old henna songs. Friday — the wedding day — sees the procession (zifa) leave the groom's house for the bride's, to the rhythm of drum and zurna; the bride wears the white gown embroidered over traditional Kurdish dress, and the dengbêj (storyteller-singer) leads with poems of wisdom and praise. Then the great circle of the govend opens in the courtyard of the groom's house and dances until dawn. On the third day — 'the seventh', a survival from the seven-day feast of older times — only the couple and the groom's family gather, to begin family life. Live Kurdish music, mountains of pilaf and Kurdish kufta, and unending black tea are constants.