Peter Nicolaus
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Tbilisi

The appearance of a Sanjaq in the Ozmanyan family

According to the Ozmanyan family, a long, long time ago a Sheikh called Ozman lived in Kars, which is now a part of Turkey. He dwelled in a village, which the Yezidis called Sisak. The Kars province was at that time part of Russia, and Sisak a village where about 300 Yezidi families lived peacefully alongside their Armenian neighbours. Most of these Yezidi families were murids, who referred to themselves as the Sipkani or Sipki community. Sheikh Ozman had two older brothers, Sheikh Adi and Sheikh Rasho. The older brothers were honourable persons and respected by the entire community, but Sheikh Ozman had the greatest respect and was loved by everyone. He was very gifted and talented with regard to all religious matters and could memorise all prayers and qewls. Before his beard started growing,Sheikh Ozman had a dream, wherein an angel commanded him never to shave and to become a religious leader.
Sheikh Ozman followed the divine instruction and when he was about 18 years old, he had two more dreams. In the first dream, he heard an angel’s voice telling him: “You shall remove everything of blue colour from the ster in your house, and you shall find soon a sanjaq there. Show it to the people and tell them that it came from heaven” the second dream, a few days later, the voice told him: “Cover the ster with white linen, as Malak Tawus is about to arrive”. Sheikh Ozman followed the command and the next day a sanjaq was found on the top of the ster. At the same time one sanjaq disappeared from the sanctuary in Lalish in Northern Iraq, and the religious leaders there approached a kochek18 with the instruction to find out where the sanjaq was. The kochek replied that he would have to be alone for some time and meditate. Thus he went into a cave and stayed there for seven days. When he came out of the cave he told the leaders that the sanjaq was at the Sisak village with a very religious family.
The leaders said: “We have to go and see”. The Mir, one qewwal and several feqirs19 went and eventually found the sanjaq at Sheikh Ozman’s house. He impressed them so much that they decided to take the sanjaq, as well as Sheikh Ozman and his family with them back to Lalish. However, the villagers, the Sipkani community, resisted and stressed: “If you take the sanjaq and our religious leaders with you, you force us to change our religion”. Their concern was well-founded, as Sheikh Ozman was the sheikh of most of the murids in the village. Hence, the religious leaders from Lalish agreed to leave Sheikh Ozman in his native village and to allow him to keep the sanjaq. They dressed Sheikh Ozman in a khirqe and made him a feqir.