Dengbêj: the Kurdish storytellers who sing history

Picture a room full of guests late in the evening. An older singer leans back, closes their eyes and begins, with no instrument at all. For a long while the room follows a love story, a battle or a lament for someone long gone. That singer is a dengbêj, one of the Kurdish singer-storytellers who have carried history in their voices for generations.

The tradition lives above all in Kurmancî (Northern Kurdish). This guide explains what the word means, what dengbêjs sing, where you can still hear them and why their songs matter to anyone learning the language. New to Kurdish culture? Start with who the Kurds are.

What does dengbêj mean?

The word has two parts. The first, deng, means “voice” or “sound”. The second, -bêj, comes from the Kurmancî verb for “to say” or “to tell”. So a dengbêj is someone who tells with the voice. The art itself is called dengbêjî.

Soranî (Central Kurdish) uses the same word for voice: دەنگ.

You can hear the -bêj part in everyday Kurmancî whenever someone says or tells something:

“As the saying goes” usually leads into a proverb, and Kurdish has plenty of them. Find more in our guide to Kurdish idioms.

The same ending turns other words into people. A stran is a song, so a stranbêj is a singer. The Soranî word for a singer, گۆرانیبێژ, is built the same way. Someone who tells stories in prose is a çîrokbêj, from Çîrok, “story”.

Kilam and stran

Dengbêjs talk about two kinds of sung piece. A kilam is a long sung story. It flows freely, close to speech, and the singer often runs one line into the next with hardly a pause. It is sung from memory, not read from a page.

A stran is a song in the everyday sense, with a steady tune and rhythm. Wedding songs and dance songs belong here. The line between the two is not always sharp, and singers from different regions use the words a little differently.

Traditionally, a young singer learned kilams from a master. The apprentice listened, practised and was corrected, and sang in public only when the master gave permission.

Epics, love stories and laments

Most dengbêjs sing without any instrument (amûr). The voice carries everything: the story, the melody and the feeling. In some regions singers add a traditional instrument, but the voice on its own is the heart of the art.

The stories fall into a few big families:

• Heroic epics about battles and brave deeds, which can last an hour or more.
• Love stories, which are often tragic and end in separation or death.
• Laments for the dead, for lost homes and for hard times.
• Songs of place and daily life, full of the names of villages, mountains and rivers, and of local events people wanted to remember.

Many events in Kurdish village life were never written down, so kilams worked as a spoken archive. That is why the dengbêjs are often called the memory of their communities.

Some of these stories are very old. The love story of Mem and Zîn lived in the oral tradition, in a version called Memê Alan, before the poet Ehmedê Xanî turned it into his classic written poem. Read more in our guide to Kurdish literature.

Laments are sung in a sorrowful mood that Kurmancî sums up in a short idiom:

Dilê min teng e دڵم تەنگە My heart is heavy (I am sad)

Evenings, guest halls and radio

For generations, the stage was a home. Neighbours gathered in a village house in the evening to listen. These evening gatherings are called şevbihêrk, a word that begins with şev, “night”.

Chiefs and landowners often held gatherings in a large guest hall, the dîwan, and a good dengbêj was always welcome there. Some of them supported a singer, who in return sang about their family and their deeds. Dengbêjs also sang at weddings and funerals, and until 1980 they still met in tea houses in Diyarbakır.

In the twentieth century the voices travelled further. Kurdish-language programmes from Yerevan radio, in Soviet Armenia, broadcast dengbêj singing to listeners far beyond the city. Later, cassette tapes passed from hand to hand.

Famous dengbêjs

Many singers kept the art alive, and most were known only in their own area. A few names are remembered by Kurds almost everywhere.

• Evdalê Zeynikê was a nineteenth-century master who died in the early 1900s. He travelled widely and sang at the gatherings of chiefs and landowners. He became so famous that later dengbêjs sing about him as a figure of legend, and his life inspired a 1991 novel by the Kurdish writer Mehmed Uzun.
• Karapetê Xaço was born into an Armenian family in the early 1900s and sang in Kurmancî. He settled in Yerevan, and for decades his voice was heard on the Kurdish programmes of Yerevan radio. He died in 2005, past the age of 100 by most accounts, and his recordings remain a key source for later singers.
• Şakiro, born Şakir Deniz in 1936 in the Ağrı region, is one of the best-loved dengbêjs of recent times. Listeners called him Kewê Ribat, “the partridge of Ribat”, for the beauty of his voice. He died in 1996, and younger singers still learn from his recordings.
• Meryem Xan and Eyşe Şan are among the best-known women’s voices of the twentieth century, and their recordings carried Kurdish songs to a wide audience.

When a kilam touches its listeners, Kurmancî has an idiom for the feeling: Dilê min germ bû. It means “My heart became warm”, in other words “I was moved”.

The tradition today

The tradition has lived through hard decades. For long periods in the twentieth century, Kurdish was restricted in Turkey, and after 1980 many dengbêjs stopped singing in public. Some say parts of their repertoire were lost in those silent years.

Today the art has new homes. Some cities in the region have opened dengbêj houses, called Mala Dengbêjan in Kurmancî. The best known opened in Diyarbakır in May 2007. Inside, older dengbêjs sit together over tea and take turns singing, while visitors listen and record. For many people, it is a rare chance to hear a kilam sung live.

Dengbêjs also appear at festivals, on television and on recordings, and younger musicians rework old kilams in new styles. Performances are usually shorter and more staged than the old evenings. Fewer young people learn from a master in the old way, and some learn from recordings instead.

Why it matters for Kurmancî learners

For anyone learning Kurmancî, the dengbêj tradition is a treasure chest. Kilams keep old words, place names and expressions that you rarely meet in a textbook. They also show how the language sounds when it carries real feeling.

Em mîrata xwe diparêzin /ɛm miˈrata xwɛ dɪpaˈrɛzɪn/ میراتەکەمان دەپارێزین We protect our heritage

To follow a kilam one day, start with everyday Kurmancî. ZimanGo’s free core course teaches it step by step, with audio in every lesson, in our Kurmancî course.