900 Kurdish Songs in the Archive of Radio Yerevan Now on Digital Platforms

Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish

"Êrîvan xeber dide. Guhdarên ezîz, naha bibîzin deng û behsên teze". Or, to put it in English: "Radio Yerevan presents the news. Dear audience, you'll now listen to the news."

What you read above is an expression that has become a cliche for Kurds since 1955. The Kurdish broadcasting of Armenia's Radio Yerevan has very much affected the generation of the time and the ones coming after.

Especially in Turkey, where even speaking Kurdish was forbidden, people, with their limited means, would turn on their radios and listen to the news, stories and songs broadcast by Radio Yerevan.

Hundreds of artists performed their works in the Kurdish hours of the radio. The corpus comprising these works are now listened by that generation as well as the ones coming after. However, again due to limited means, the voices and names of only very few of them are known today.

Having started its works last year, the German-Kurdish Cultural Institute (Deutsch-Kurdisches Kulturinstitut) has started publishing the songs in the Archive of Radio Yerevan on digital platforms after a four-year work.

This corpus of 900 works can now be listened on all digital platforms, especially on the Youtube channel of the Institute.

When some of these works were previously shared on the Internet, several of them or their performers were either misspelled or misrepresented. The Institute aims to eliminate this problem with this work.

Hundreds of works not known till today have been brought to light thanks to the efforts of the Institute. The online broadcast of this corpus will also serve as a comprehensive repertoire for the Kurdish culture and arts community. Relying on this new source, Kurdish artists can now listen to the people's strans and klams from the most accurate source and reproduce them.

Three-day campaign by the institute

Sharing 900 songs and their lyrics for the first time with the public, the Institute has called on all Kurdish artists to subscribe to its Youtube channel and share only their favorite songs among the Radio Yerevan songs on their social media accounts for three days from April 27 (today) to 29.

A four-book series to be published soon

Aiming to provide sources that can be reached by music lovers and especially by the musicians performing their arts in Kurdish, the Institute is also preparing to publish a three-book series and a DVD on artist Cewad Merwani, including musical notes, songs and lyrics. The Institute has been working on this publication with a large team for the last 3 years.

(FD/SD)