A map for names, not for borders

Every place on this map has more than one name.

A village has one name in the language spoken in its houses, and another in the language of the state that administers it. Often the second name arrived by decree, in a particular year, and replaced the first. Sometimes the first name now survives only in the memory of a family that no longer lives there.

Nexşe records both, and where possible the year in between. That is the whole idea.

Why names

Renaming is quiet work. It leaves no ruins and no photographs. A generation later, the older name exists only where somebody wrote it down — and for much of this region, nobody did.

Across the twentieth century, thousands of place names in the four parts of Kurdistan were officially replaced: in Turkey through successive renaming programmes, in Syria and Iran through comparable measures. The new names are on every road sign, in every register and on every map. The old ones are in people's mouths.

A map that shows only one of the two is not neutral. It has simply chosen the side with the better archive.

So Nexşe holds both names for every place it knows, side by side, with the date of the change and the source where we found it — and lets you switch between them with one click.

What we record

Names. The Kurdish name, the current official name, earlier names, and, where documented, when and by which decree a name was changed. This is the core of the project.

Places. Provinces, cities, villages, mountains, rivers, lakes, protected areas, historical and cultural sites — where they are, what they belong to, and what is known about them.

History, people, language and culture of each region, including the chapters that are hard to read.

The limits of what we know. Where a figure is uncertain, estimated or disputed, we say so.

What we do not do

Nexşe represents no political party, organisation or movement. We show no party emblems, no organisational flags and no portraits of political leaders.

Nexşe is a work of documentation, not of advocacy.

Many of the people who make this map, and many who use it, hold convictions about the future of this region. This is not the place where those are argued — not because they do not matter, but because a record has to be usable by people who disagree with each other.

We record what places are called and what has happened to them. What you conclude from that is yours.

Kurdistan is understood here as a geographical and cultural region whose territories today lie mainly within Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Where definitions of its extent differ — and they do — we show the competing definitions with their sources rather than choosing one and calling it settled.

Everyone who lived here

Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmens, Arabs, Yazidis, Jews and others have made their homes, given their names and buried their dead in these valleys. Their places belong on this map as much as any other, under the names they used.

The difficult chapters

Dersim in 1937 and 1938. Anfal. Halabja. The destruction of thousands of villages. Şengal in 2014. Displacement, flight, and the villages that were never rebuilt.

These belong to the history of these places, and we do not leave them out. Leaving them out would not be restraint; it would be a false record.

We set them down as documented history — with sources, with the numbers that are known and the uncertainty around them, in plain language. A record of what demonstrably happened does not need to be sharpened.

Sources

Anything beyond the immediately verifiable carries a source. We prefer scholarly literature, official publications and archival material. Oral tradition is marked as such and is valuable to us precisely where written records are thin or were erased.

Our geographical base data comes largely from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, corrected and extended by our own research and by people who know these places.

Population figures for this region are estimates. Reliable censuses by ethnicity are not conducted here. We therefore give ranges with a source rather than single numbers.

If your village is missing

Much of what Nexşe should know is in no database. It is in the memory of families. Someone who knows the name of their grandmother's village knows more than any map does.

You can add it. Contributions are reviewed before they appear. We do not publish the personal details of contributors and we do not store IP addresses.

Mistakes

Nexşe contains errors. We correct them when we are told about them and record substantial corrections openly. Corrections are welcome — including uncomfortable ones.

Independence

Nexşe is not run by an institution, a party or a government body. It is made by a small group of independent people, in their own time, and paid for by donations.

We accept no funding that comes with conditions attached to content, and we publish what the project costs to run.

We do not name the people who work on Nexşe or who contribute to it. For some of them, being named would carry a risk that this project is not worth.

Use our work

The data we collect is available under [licence] and may be reused with attribution. We want people to work with it.

Nexşe means "map".