The Reşvan, Reşwan or Rişvan tribe is a Kurdish tribe, native to the Adıyaman, Gaziantep, Kahramanmaraş and Malatya areas. Notably they reside Kahta district of Adıyaman Province, the northern part of Konya Province and southern part of Ankara Province. Some Reşvan Kurds live in Sivas, Qazvin (Iran) and Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) as well.
Contents
History
Experts suggest that the name Reşvan is a compound of reş ("black") and the Kurdish plural form -ân. The name of the tribe was recorded in the defter (tax register) back in 1519, when Sultan Selim I conquered Malatya and Kahta. The tribe was also mentioned in 1524 and 1536, although its numbers were not recorded. The tribe was like all other Kurdish tribes nomadic before the Ottoman Empire managed to sedentarize them, as part of the Tanzimat. The first attempt to sedentarize the tribe took place in 1830 and the process continued through Atatürk's Reforms (about 1923). During the sedentarization the Reşvan tribe was one of the biggest and most influential Kurdish tribes.
In the 1800s, some Kurds from the tribe moved to or were deported to Central Anatolia, where they today reside in many villages around Cihanbeyli, Haymana, Boztepe and Kulu. A 1859 document shows that about 500 households of the tribe lived in Haymana, Ankara, being sedentarized in 43 villages.
During the 1890s, the leader of the tribe Yakup Ragıp from Besni protected Armenians from Ottoman massacres.
Politics and elections
The majority of the tribe are Sunni Muslims (and a minority Alevi), inhabiting Adıyaman, Kahramanmaraş and Malatya, and tend to be conservative. The tribe mainly voted for the conservative AKP until 2014, when the well-known Reşvan Kurdish politician Dengir Mir Mehmet Fırat resigned from AKP and decided to run for the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in the local election in 2015. The leaders of the tribe decided to vote for HDP in the general election in June 2015.