Helina Blogs

Photo credit goes to Allen Kakony

C heese made in Animal skin, is that even possible? Yes!  If you don't believe me, you can see it for yourself in the famous Qaisari Bazar in Hawler. To make the process a bit easier for you, I have asked the shop owners if they could please allow me to take some photos of the sheep skin with the cheese in it.  They not only agreed but took the initiative to set the blocks of cheese so neat for my pictures.  This is what is so called the "Peneri Pesti".  A bit pricy but so worth having it for breakfast almost everyday.  This cheese is what makes my day every friday having breakfast with the family.  Pest  means sheep’s skin or simply, skin in Kurdish.  The cheese made with sheep and cow and some times, goat milk takes its name from the method of its production. The milk curd is let to rest in animal skin during its preparation.  The cities of Erzincan and Izmir are among of the key Kurdish cities famous for their skin cheese.  Most com...

This blog is special because it will be about a very special city, a city too close to my heart.  So today, instead of marking papers or preparing a lecture, I choose to blog about a city that bears the scars from decades of war and economic sanction.  It’s the proud home of the Citadel and the Minaret. Its my birth town in the early eighties. It’s the city of Hawler or Erbil in Arabic. Hawler is where old meets new, a blend of history, mosaic mosques, bazaars, rollercoasters, an appeal to both the young and old generation. The citadel is one of the oldest contiguously inhabited settlements in the world. With its modern shopping malls and verdant parks, Hawler is becoming the welcome break for Iraqis who are still plagued by bombings more than eight years after the U.S.-led invasion that led to the overthrew of Saddam Hussein. If you ask any Hawleri to describe the same Hawler 20 years ago, they would start off with Sami's Park which took an extra year or two to open its ...