Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States – and a new podcast, “the country in our hearts” by WPLN, tells the history of the diaspora.
Scott Detrow, host:
Two years ago this week ago, Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan became a sister city of Nashville, Tennessee, here in the United States Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States. And a new WPLN podcast tells how it happened. It is a story of bloody genocide, fighters of freedom, perseverance. And the host Rose Gilbert is there to tell us about it. Hey, pink.
Rose Gilbert, byline: Hey. How are you doing?
Detrow: I’m fine. Thank you for joining us. Let’s start with the title of your podcast – always a good starting point – “The country in our hearts”. Tell me what it means, where it comes from.
Gilbert: Yes, so everything comes back to the fact that Kurdistan is not technically a country.
Detow: Yeah.
Gilbert: It is a widespread region in four countries – Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. And the Kurds have their own story of oppression and fight for autonomy in these four countries. And the way a man explained to me when I pointed out this project is that Kurdistan is a country that only exists in the heart of its people, and which has really stayed with me.
Detow: Yeah. How did you meet this story for the first time?
Gilbert: So, as you said, Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish community in the United States. And if you spend time here, you will see it. You know, these are Kurdish restaurants. These are Kurdish markets. If you are going to catch a Predators game, a hockey game, there are Kurdish cultural theme evenings. But the question is, how did they get here, and why did they come here? This is really what led this project.
Detrow: Can you tell me about a conversation you had in this project?
Gilbert: Yes, there is a particular conversation that really launched this podcast.
Detow: Yeah.
Gilbert: At the start of my reports, I spoke to a man named Nash Chalke who owned one of these markets in South Nashville. This is where I met him for the first time, and that’s where I sat with him to take a cup of tea and listen to him tell the story of his family.
(Soundbite of Podcast, “The Country in Our Hearts”)
Nash Chalke: So my father, he was one of the peshmergas who literally appeared on a list, you know, so that they can catch. I mean, he was a warrior.
Gilbert: Everyone had to drop what they were doing – cook, take care of harvests, laundry – and flee to hide. It was chaos.
Chalke: My mother tells me the stories that I fell with her hand. So she literally left me behind. Some others had to catch up with me and bring me.
Gilbert: They ended up fleeing in Türkiye. It was the beginning of a fascinating childhood.
Chalke: You know, someone would scream, helicopter. And, you know, everyone would be right – you know, we knew exactly – it was an instinctive thing. Everyone knew how to hide.
Detow: wow. So he finally went to Tennessee then, with many others.
Gilbert: Yes, you know, it’s a common story, especially for families who were – had family members involved in the Peshmerga, still on the run. But there was this great historical event which occurred in 1988, called Al Anfal (PH), which was a military campaign of the Ba’athist party of the armies of Saddam Hussein to drive out the Kurds. It was actually ethnic cleaning. Whole villages have disappeared in mass pits in, like the duration of a few months. And that’s what really hunted hundreds of thousands of Kurds from Iraq, and many of them found themselves in America and found themselves in Nashville.
Detrow: You know, regarding a family or as regards a community, I have the impression that there are the big stories that you tell everyone and that you send. But often, they are flattened, and a lot of details, especially the painful details, could be a little bright. I wonder, as you pointed out this story, did you have an idea of how many details were really well known in the Kurdish community and how many were not? How much had intentionally or involuntarily forgotten?
Gilbert: I mean, the contours were really well known. People were very proud to know where they came from. They knew that their families had to flee. They knew why. But there was this kind of silence at the heart of many of these stories, this trauma on exactly what happened. And so often I made people’s children acted as translators for their older parents or grandparents. And there were these kinds of incredible moments when I realized that they heard these stories for the first time too. It just fled me.
Detow: Yeah. We are obviously talking about the late 80s, but you take the story to the present day. And immigration, migration, people who need to flee where they come from, is a subject very before and present in 2025. How do you see it all adapt?
Gilbert: I mean, it’s so relevant, right? I mean, the programs that brought these families to America were very frozen earlier this year. There were frozen refugee flights. The same programs that allowed people to come from refugee camps in Türkiye and reinstall in Nashville might not have been there for them. But it is even more relevant because there is this new wave of Kurdish people who come to Nashville – this time in Türkiye. And they are in a little boat different from their Iraqi Kurdish counterparts because they arrive as asylum seekers over the American-mexic border.
And I sat with one of their families to compare their stories to what Nash Chalke and his family lived in the late 1980s in the early 90s. And I couldn’t help but realize that they came in a very different America, an America which was perhaps less welcoming or more difficult to navigate. It therefore really brings the very current conversation to immigration to this project and brings these stories from the 80s and 90s to the present day.
Detrow: One of the scenes of this podcast is the traditional New Year’s celebration, Newroz. Can you tell me what it looks like in Nashville?
Gilbert: Yes, then Newroz, it marks the beginning of spring. It is a new year celebration, and we have had one here in Nashville since 1994. It is still outside or generally outside. There is music. There is dance. There is a picnic.
(Soundbite of Music)
Gilbert: Everything is focused on a symbolic flame, which represents a kind of this light in the dark, the start of the light season, the start of the hot season. And it was important for me for two reasons. One, Newroz, because it has become really symbolic of Kurdish identity abroad, has sometimes been targeted by governments and by the Islamic State in Syria. So a person told me as an obligation to celebrate it well because they can, but also because in a story and a story that has so many dark moments, Newroz is a little literally this light in darkness. And this is what I wanted to emphasize – that with all this very painful story and all these problems, there is also this incredible resilience and this joy.
Detrow: it’s Rose Gilbert, host of the new Podcast, “The Country in Our Hearts”, from the WPLN member station. Thank you so much.
Gilbert: Thank you.
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit the pages of use of the conditions of use of our website on www.npr.org for more information.
The accuracy and availability of NPR transcriptions may vary. The transcription text can be revised to correct errors or match audio updates. Audio on npr.org can be published after its original broadcast or publication. The file authorizing the NPR programming is the audio recording.
