Siege of Dimdım Castle and Emir Khan Bradosti in Safavid Chronicles

Four centuries ago, Shah Abbas, the Safavid shah, and Emir Khan, the Mir of Bradost, The war that took place between Bradosti and known as the Siege of Dimdım Castle was discussed in detail in Safavid sources, and this historical event became legendary in Kurdish oral culture and has been told for centuries. In this study, the before of the siege of Dimdım Castle, the reasons of the siege and its reflections on epic narratives are analyzed. has been made. The records of the event in the Safavid chronicles were translated verbatim and a variant of the Dimdım Epic, which has many variants, was shared and compared with historical records. In the four Safavid chronicles, where the translations of the relevant parts were shared and were written in close periods, the same subject was written by different authors and reflected different perspectives. Therefore, it can be said that Safavid historians complement each other regarding the siege of Dimdım Castle and the victory of Emir Khan Bradosti. There is no doubt that reading and evaluating the four chronicles together will enable the formation of a holistic perspective on the subject in question and will enable the event to be clarified to a great extent when evaluated together with the Dimdım Epic. The siege of Dimdim Castle by the Safavids, the massacre of the castle's inhabitants, and the subsequent Mukri massacre are one of the tragic events of Kurdish history. However, the Kurds, who created an epic out of this tragedy, ensured that the Dimdım Castle resistance, which is an important sign of heroism, sacrifice, solidarity, effort and courage, remained alive in memories by transferring it from generation to generation. The Dimdim Epic, which spread over a wide geography from Iran to Syria, from Iraq to Turkey and the Caucasus, and was adorned with new motifs as it spread, became a common creation of the Kurds' social memory, and turned into an oral history document, loaded with different emotions from each geography.