Silenced Kurdish storytellers sing again

Dengbêj disappeared following the criminalisation of the Kurdish language after the 1980 military coup but have re-emerged
Dengbêj gathered in Diyarbakir
Dengbêj in Diyarbakir. The tradition stretches back to pre-Islamic times. Photograph: Constanze Letsch for the Guardian

It is one of the few places in Turkey where neither blasting pop music nor flatscreen televisions entertain visitors: in the House of Dengbêj, the professional reciters of epics have gathered. One singer, his hand cupped behind his ear, recites a love story in song, unaccompanied by musical instruments.

"I am the nightingale of Diyarbakir," says 80-year-old Seyithan Simsek, who has been a dengbêj, or epic singer, since he was aged seven. "But the art of the dengbêj was started by women. When a family member fell ill or was killed, and their pain was too much to bear, they started singing."

The dengbêj tradition reaches back to pre-Islamic times, but Simsek remembers whole villages gathering around him, eagerly listening to his songs. "Nobody would sleep. After dinner I started to sing, and I would not stop until the break of dawn."

With the arrival of radio, television and the computer, interest in the tales of the dengbêj diminished. Criminalisation of the Kurdish language after the military coup of 1980 finally silenced the storytellers, and many songs were lost.

"Not a single cassette was saved from the fascist period of [coup leader] Kenan Evren," one dengbêj says. "Every recording they found was burned or broken and buried, and the people they had found them with were beaten and arrested."

Ramzi Mutlu, a regular visitor though not a dengbêj, recalls: "They found a cassette in my house, one little cassette. It contained two or three songs in Kurdish. Because of it, I was tortured for two days and then went to jail for four months."

When in 1991 Turgut Özal legalised the use of Kurdish in recording and publishing, the dengbêj started to re-emerge. The Diyarbakir municipality inaugurated the House of Dengbêj in 2007; according to the singers there, it is the only one in the Kurdish region.

Not everyone believes the dengbêj are now free: "We are allowed to sing, but only the songs the government likes to hear," says one singer. Among themselves, they sometimes sing about the Kurdish struggle, but never on TV or on stage. "You are allowed to sing about love, but not about politics. But the essence of the art of dengbêj is supposed to express all the sorrows and the worries of the Kurdish people."

Dengbêj do not receive a salary, but the municipality provides them with a free lunch and a bus ticket to the city centre, and the local Gün TV station pays a small fee for appearances. Hundreds of ballads and epics are npw gathered in a digital archive, and Kurds of all factions have started to take a more active interest in the singers, formerly dismissed as part of a feudal past.

Simsek thinks it is good there is a house where the dengbêj can freely gather and sing again, and says political pressure has decreased. With the Kurdish issue still unresolved, and with violence and political arrests on the rise, there remains much to be sung about.