As I was looking at Attila Durak’s photographs, which document
the sweeping journey he undertook with his traveling companion,
the art of ebru, I thought of what the Western world refers to as
tattoos, but which we Kurds, and even Arabs and Assyrians, call
deq known as dövme in Turkish. Ever since my childhood, I have
been mystified by deq, that conjurer of the unknown. What exactly
is deq, to which the people of eastern Anatolia—the Kurds, the
Arabs, the Armenians, and the Assyrians—have always been
attracted? What is it that the deq, a visual manifestation of the
mystery of the East inscribed by folk artists on the human skin, evokes?
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