Radio Yerevan: The Sound Memory of Kurdish Music

At a Glance

Radio Yerevan, broadcasting from the capital of Soviet Armenia, began its Kurdish programs in 1955. The first broadcast was one day a week, a fifteen-minute news bulletin; over the years it grew to every day and ninety minutes. Its opening line was carved into generations of memory: "Yêrêvan xeber dide, guhdarên ezîz!" (Yerevan is speaking, dear listeners!).
In the years when Kurdish was banned, this broadcast was a free voice arriving from beyond the border. On the Turkish side, villagers gathered around the radio in the evenings, most often in secret.
The radio did not only give news; it put kilams (long sung narratives) on record. Today people speak of thousands of Kurdish recordings in the Yerevan archive. An oral culture turned, in this studio, into a sound archive.
The roots of Kurdish cultural life in Yerevan run deeper: the Latin-script Kurmancî newspaper Riya Teze began appearing in Yerevan in 1930.
For the first two years the radio's entire staff was two people: the chief Casimê Celîl, and the first announcer, Enziva Reşid, chosen by competition. The multiplying of recordings and the building of the archive came in the era of Halil Muradov, who took the post in 1957.
Among the radio's voices were names like Karapetê Xaço, Şeroyê Biro, Aslîka Qadir, Xana Zazê, and Aramê Dîkran.
There was an older center too: Radio Baghdad, founded in 1936, began Kurdish with fifteen minutes a day and by 1949 had raised its broadcast to two hours and forty-five minutes. Voices like Meryem Xan and Hesen Zîrek were recorded there.
Meryem Xan, Eyşe Şan, Hesen Zîrek: in this article you will find the stories of three great voices of the recording age.
The argument is this: radio became the conservatory of a stateless people. The music whose school was banned built a school on the airwaves.

A Serhed village, one evening in the 1960s. Serhed is the world of high plateaus in what is now eastern Turkey. The day has darkened, the animals are brought in. On the shelf against the head wall of the room sits the household's most valuable object: a battery radio.

The head of the house gives a look. The radio comes down. The dial is turned at exactly the right moment. First the crackle, then a thin whistle. And then, from a distant city, that sentence fills the room:

"Yêrêvan xeber dide, guhdarên ezîz!"

Yerevan is speaking, dear listeners. No one in the room speaks. Because the language coming out of the radio is the language that brings trouble if spoken outside the door. Not in school, not in court, not in the state. And yet, on the airwaves, it exists. And it is singing.

In a moment a kilam (the long sung narrative) begins. Perhaps the voice of Karapetê Xaço, perhaps Susika Simo. The old woman closes her eyes. The children look at the box the sound comes from. That box, on those evenings, does the same work in a million homes: it gives a people its own voice back.

Kurdish in Yerevan: Where Do the Roots Come From?

That this broadcast came from Yerevan was no accident. In the Caucasus, on the lands of present-day Armenia, a rooted Kurdish community lived; most were Êzîdî (Yazidi) Kurds. In the first decades of the Soviet order, the openings granted to minority languages opened a cultural space for this community.

The concrete document is from 1930: that year the newspaper Riya Teze (in some sources Reya Teze) began to appear in Yerevan. Its name means New Way; it was printed in Latin-script Kurmancî, the northern dialect of Kurdish. It is one of the longest-lived names in the Kurdish press. After the break of the Stalin years it reappeared in 1955, and Mîroyê Esed ran it for a full thirty-four years. Schools, theater work, and folklore compilations grew from the same environment. Families like the Celîl family gathered kilams and tales village by village and wrote them down; these compilations are among the foundation stones of Kurdish folklore studies today.

The radio's Kurdish section was built on exactly this ground. The academic study of Radio Yerevan gives the beginning in detail: Kurdish broadcasting began in 1955, as a single day a week and a fifteen-minute news bulletin. For the first two years the entire staff was two people: the section chief Casimê Celîl, and Enziva Reşid, who won a competition for the announcer's post and stayed at that microphone for a full twenty-seven years. Kurdologists and writers like Haciyê Cindî, Emînê Evdal, and Erebê Şemo supported the broadcasts; the scholarly and literary cadre of the Soviet Kurds stood behind the radio.

The turning point is 1957. A delegation from Moscow asked for an accounting of the two years and found neither regular recording nor archive. So Halil Muradov was put at the head of the radio, and Casimê Celîl became editor of the music section. Muradov held the post until 1981, and the great recording age opened in his time: songs and plays were put to tape, the broadcast rising from one day a week to every day, fifteen minutes to ninety. Sources also note the part played by the Kurdish leader Mele Mustafa Barzani's approaches to Moscow; that the radio's opening year fell just after his Soviet contacts is not counted as coincidence.

One more honest note: this was a Soviet state radio. Programs passed through Moscow's approval, and the era's ideology seeped into the language; praise of the collective farm lived on the same wavelength as the kilam. The listening villager did the sorting himself: the propaganda went off with the evening wind, the kilam stayed.

The Power of Fifteen Minutes: A Free Voice in the Years of the Ban

The radio's true audience was not in the country where its transmitter stood. It was in Turkey, in Syria, in Iran and Iraq, everywhere Kurmancî was spoken. So where does a silenced language go? After dark, it went to the airwaves.

In the 1950s and 60s, Kurdish had been erased from public life in Turkey: banned in school, absent from broadcast, its very name unspoken. On state radio not a single Kurdish song was played. Into this emptiness, in the evening hours, Yerevan's medium-wave signal crossed the border. The language the state had erased came back from a neighbor's transmitter.

In most places this listening could not be done in the open. The testimonies tell the same scene: the radio is turned on low, the door and window are watched, and when a stranger's footstep is heard the station is changed. To listen to a song is a small act of courage. But it cannot be given up. Because the radio does not only give music; it gives news too. It says what is happening in the world, in Kurdish. It reads the greetings of the soldier far from home, of the relative who has migrated. It is the spoken letter of a lost world.

Radio Yerevan had one more task, the most lasting of all: recording. This was not built in a day; in the first two years the studio kept no regular recordings. After the reorganization of 1957 the studio turned into a recording center: dengbêjs (the master singers who carry a people's memory), vocalists, and plays were put to tape. Kilams, laments, wedding tunes were gathered, archived, kept. Today people speak of thousands of Kurdish recordings in that archive. Oral culture is fleeting; when the singer dies, the word dies too. The Yerevan studio is a dam built against that. In our dengbêj article we called the kilam a spoken archive. Yerevan is that archive put to tape.

Those at the Microphone

An archive lives by names. What good is one without them? Let us name a few of the voices of the Yerevan microphone.

Karapetê Xaço: the great kilam master of Armenian birth. A voice that survived 1915 and sang Kurdish like a mother tongue. We told his story in detail in our dengbêj article; here let us say only this: had Radio Yerevan not recorded his voice, one of the most moving voices of the twentieth century would have been lost.

A few of the other names in the recordings: Şeroyê Biro and Efoyê Esed, among the heavy masters of the kilam. Aslîka Qadir and Xana Zazê, among the pioneers of women's voices; in an age when a woman's stepping to the microphone was itself a matter, they entered the recordings. Aramê Dîkran, an Armenian-born voice like Karapetê Xaço; he sang in Kurdish and was much loved. Egîdê Cimo stood beside these voices as a master of the wind instruments.

The birth and death dates of most of these names shift a little from source to source, the common fate of lives no one recorded. But their voices are dateless: today, in digital form, one click away from anyone who knows how to listen.

The Other Center: Baghdad's Kurdish Wavelength

Was Yerevan the only such voice? No, and not even the first. To the south there was an older center: Radio Baghdad, founded in 1936. In Iraq, Kurdish was not banned wholesale as it was in Turkey; Radio Baghdad began with fifteen minutes a day of Kurdish and in 1949 raised this to two hours and forty-five minutes. Other stations came between: the Levant Radio of the French administration in Beirut broadcast half an hour of Kurmancî twice a week in 1941; the British wartime station carried Soranî broadcasts too.

The historical importance of this service is great, because it put two giant voices on record.

One is Meryem Xan. Born in 1904, this voice is the first great Kurdish woman star of the recording age, among the first Kurdish women to fill a record. Her voice was both strong and wounded; the kilams and strans (folk songs) she sang were repeated for generations. She died in Baghdad in 1949. Today her name is spoken as the dawn of the woman's voice in Kurdish music.

The other is Hesen Zîrek. He was born in 1921 in Bukan; he became the greatest voice of the Soranî style, the southern dialect of Kurdish. His reading and writing were next to none; against that he held an endless treasure of songs in memory. He filled hundreds of recordings in the studios of Baghdad, Tehran, and Kirmanshah; some counts push his recordings toward a thousand, the exact number disputed. He died in 1972. Today the roof of Soranî music still rests on his shoulders.

Two radios, two dialects, one work: Yerevan became the sound bank of Kurmancî, Baghdad mostly of Soranî. The conservatory of a stateless people was built in the studios of two neighboring capitals. A conservatory means a school of music; the Kurds' was opened on the airwaves.

Eyşe Şan: The Voice That Passed Through the Ban

This article has one more voice whose story gathers all the contradictions of the recording age into a single life: Eyşe Şan.

She was born in 1938 in Diyarbakır, the Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey; her father too was a man of word and voice. But that his own daughter should step onto a stage, that a woman's voice should mix into the public, both house and neighborhood opposed. Eyşe Şan was first heard at weddings; then she crossed the walls of her home, reached Gaziantep, and from there stretched to Istanbul. She sang in Kurdish; she filled records. What does it cost to break two bans in one voice? She paid in exclusion from her family, in loneliness, in years of exile. For a time she went to Germany; she returned; she settled in İzmir and died there in 1996.

In her voice two bans press one on the other: the ban on her language and the ban on her gender. She listened to neither. Today pieces of hers like "Qederê" are among the most sung works of Kurdish music. The line running from Meryem Xan to Eyşe Şan is the family tree of the Kurdish woman's voice in the recording age; the older roots of that tree you can find in our article on Kurdish women in history.

What State Is the Archive In, and Who Holds the Inheritance?

And today? Radio Yerevan's golden age is behind it; the Soviet Union broke apart, broadcast hours shrank, the audience moved to television and the internet.

But the archive stands. The Kurdish tapes in the storerooms of Armenia's radio are a treasure that researchers and musicians have rediscovered in recent years. There are efforts to digitize the recordings, to move them from tape to digital files; a portion has already reached the internet. Young Kurdish musicians draw melodies from them; researchers write theses; grandchildren find on their phones the voice their grandfather heard in his youth.

Still, an honest warning is needed: tape decays, an archive needs care. Fully digitizing these recordings and opening them to the public is one of the most concrete tasks before Kurdish cultural institutions. A people's hundred-year sound memory is too valuable to be left to a few well-meaning storerooms.

That home that turned the radio on low in the evening no longer exists. But the grandchildren of the children who grew up in that home now listen to the same kilams out loud. This is the hundred-year work of a half-hour broadcast: to keep the voice, in order to give it back to its owner.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Radio Yerevan begin broadcasting in Kurdish? In 1955. The first broadcast was one day a week, a fifteen-minute news bulletin; the first staff was only two people. After the reorganization of 1957, the broadcast rose to every day of the week and ninety minutes.

What does "Yêrêvan xeber dide" mean? It means "Yerevan is speaking." The opening announcement, "Yêrêvan xeber dide, guhdarên ezîz!" (Yerevan is speaking, dear listeners!), settled into the shared memory of generations.

Why was Radio Yerevan so important? For two reasons: in the years when Kurdish was banned, it was a free Kurdish voice arriving from across the border; and in its studio it recorded thousands of kilams and songs, forming one of the largest sound archives of Kurdish music.

Who were Meryem Xan and Eyşe Şan? Meryem Xan (1904 to 1949) was among the first Kurdish women to fill a record; she is known for her Baghdad recordings. Eyşe Şan (1938 to 1996), born in Diyarbakır, was one of the strongest women's voices of the recording age, singing in Kurdish despite family and social pressure.

Can the recordings be reached today? A portion, yes: there is work toward digitizing the archives, and many recordings circulate in digital form. Preserving the whole archive and opening it to the public is still an unfinished task.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

The academic study titled "Kurdish Radio Broadcasting in the Middle East: The Case of Radio Yerevan (1955 to 1990)"; the figures on founding, staff, and broadcast hours are taken from here.
Celîlê Celîl and Ordîxanê Celîl, Zargotina Kurda I (compilation of Kurdish oral culture).
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition), culture chapters.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

"Yêrêvan xeber dide, guhdarên ezîz!" In the years when Kurdish was banned, this sentence entered millions of homes from across the border. The story of how a radio announcement became memory. bedelboseli.com/en/radio-yerevan-kurdish-music
The music whose school was banned built a school on the airwaves. The Yerevan studio put thousands of kilams to tape: the conservatory of a stateless people. bedelboseli.com/en/radio-yerevan-kurdish-music
The radio was turned on low, the door and window watched. To listen to a song was an act of courage. The language the state erased came back from a neighbor's transmitter. bedelboseli.com/en/radio-yerevan-kurdish-music
In Eyşe Şan's voice two bans pressed one on the other: her language and her gender. She listened to neither. The price was exile; the legacy is songs still sung today. bedelboseli.com/en/radio-yerevan-kurdish-music
When the singer dies, the word dies too; this is the fate of oral culture. The Yerevan archive is a dam built against that fate. Now the task is to guard the dam. bedelboseli.com/en/radio-yerevan-kurdish-music