Riza Talabani

Sheikh Riza Talabani (Raza)
A statue of Sheikh Riza Talabani, in Sulaymaniyah (Iraq)
Born	1835 Kirkuk
Died	1910 Suleimany
Pen name	Riza Talabani
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	Ottoman Empire
Period	(1835) – (1910)
Genre	Satire, Ribaldry, Flyting and Creative Insults

Sheikh Riza Talabani (Kurdish; Şêx Rizayê Telebanî) (1835–1910), a celebrated Kurdish poet from Kirkuk, Iraq. Talabani wrote his poetry in Kurdish, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Most of his poetry consist of Satire, Ribaldry, Flyting and creative insults.

The poet in one of his famous poems recalled his childhood in the Kurdish Emirate of Baban before it was ruled by either the Persians or the Ottomans.

As a young man of age twenty-five or so, the poet went to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople (Istanbul), and in the course of his journey, he visited the grave of the Kurdish Sufi, Sheikh Nurredin Brifkani. At the graveside he recited a long poem in Persian, telling of how he had journeyed from Kurdish Emirate of Sharazur, of which Kirkuk was its capital, to visit The Country of the Rom. In 1879, when the Ottoman Empire annexed the Wilayah of Sharazur to the Wilayah of Mosul, Riza expressed his sadness and disappointment in a poem, in Turkish, in which he told the people that Mosul had now become the capital of their Wilayah and Nafi’i Effendi was the Wali.