Evdale Zeynike: The King of the Dengbej
- Sherko Sabir
- 14 minutes ago
- 15 min read
Introduction
Among all the singers of the Kurds, one name stands above every other, half history and half legend: Evdale Zeynike, the blind master-bard of the Serhad highlands, who is remembered as the king of the dengbej and the founding father of the whole tradition of Kurdish sung epic. He lived through the long nineteenth century, by tradition for well over a hundred years, and in his deep and unforgettable voice the memory, the love and the grief of his people found their truest expression.
The great novelist Yasar Kemal called him the Homer of the Kurds, and the comparison is just. Like the blind poet of the ancient Greeks, Evdale Zeynike was a singer of heroes and wars and sorrows, a man without sight who saw further than others, and the fountainhead of a whole tradition of oral poetry. The dengbej who came after him for generations looked back to him as their master and their model, and the songs he shaped are sung in the mountains to this day.
His life itself became the stuff of legend: the fatherless boy raised in poverty and named for his mother; the farmer who could not sing until, at thirty, a dream and a long illness gave him a voice unlike any heard before; the court bard of a great lord, who followed his master to war and sang his death; the blind old man fallen into hardship, whose laments are among the most moving in all of Kurdish song. To tell the story of Evdale Zeynike is to tell the story of the dengbej tradition itself, at its very source.
Contents
Who Was Evdale Zeynike?
Evdale Zeynike, whose name means Evdal the son of Zeyne, was a legendary Kurdish dengbej, or bard, of the nineteenth century, born around 1800 in the Serhad region of the eastern highlands and remembered as the founding master of the whole dengbej tradition. Blind, according to tradition, and raised in poverty by his widowed mother, he became the court bard of a powerful local lord and the singer of his people's loves, wars and sorrows. Honoured as the king of the dengbej and called by one great writer the Homer of the Kurds, he is the towering figure at the source of Kurdish oral epic, and his songs are still sung today.
The Son of Zeyne
By the traditions gathered about him, Evdale Zeynike was born in the early years of the nineteenth century in the village of Cemalverdi, in the Tutak district of the Agri country, in the heart of the Serhad highlands beneath the great mountains of the east. His father, it is said, died when the boy was only about three years old, and he was raised in poverty by his mother, whose name was Zeyne. So closely was he bound to her that he took his name from her: he became Evdale Zeynike, Evdal the son of Zeyne, the affectionate form of her name carried in his own for the rest of his long life.
There is something deeply fitting in a great bard who bears his mother's name, for the dengbej tradition is, among other things, a tradition of memory and of the heart, and Evdale Zeynike's very name kept the memory of the woman who raised him alive in every song he sang. He grew up among the hard realities of the mountain countryside, knowing poverty and labour from his earliest years, and the long apprenticeship of suffering that this gave him would later pour out in the depth and the truth of his songs.
Key Takeaways
Evdale Zeynike was a legendary Kurdish dengbej of the nineteenth century.
He is honoured as the founder and king of the dengbej tradition.
By tradition he was blind and was raised in poverty by his mother Zeyne.
He was the court bard of Surmeli Mehmed Pasha, a lord of Eleskirt.
Yasar Kemal called him the Homer of the Kurds.
He was immortalised in a famous novel by Mehmed Uzun.
Quick Facts
Name: Evdale Zeynike, Evdal the son of Zeyne (named for his mother)
Lived: Around 1800 to about 1913, by tradition over a century
Born: The village of Cemalverdi, Tutak, in the Agri (Serhad) region
Type: Dengbej, a Kurdish bard and singer of epics and laments
Titles: The King of the Dengbej; the Homer of the Kurds
Patron: Court bard of Surmeli Mehmed Pasha, the lord of Eleskirt
Affliction: Blind, by tradition, and known for laments of his blindness
The legend: Received his gift of song at thirty after a dream and illness
In literature: Hero of Mehmed Uzun's novel Rojek ji Rojen Evdale Zeynike
Legacy: The founding figure of the Serhad dengbej tradition
The Gift of Voice
One of the most beloved legends about Evdale Zeynike concerns the way he came by his gift, for the tradition holds that he was not always a singer. Until the age of thirty, it is said, he was an ordinary farmer and labourer of the mountains, a man who tilled the soil and had never sung so much as a single song. The voice that would make him immortal lay hidden and unsuspected within him through all his early years.
Then, at the age of thirty, the story goes, he had a strange and powerful dream, and after it he fell gravely ill and lay bedridden for many months. As he slowly recovered, those around him began to hear him singing melodies from his sickbed, and the melodies were like nothing anyone had heard before, the heralds of a whole new musical mode. From that day forward he was a dengbej, and not merely a dengbej but the master of them all; and the singers of the Serhad highlands ever after traced their art back to the songs that first rose from his bed of sickness. Whatever lies behind the legend, it captures a deep truth: that his gift seemed to come from beyond himself, a calling rather than a craft.
The King of the Dengbej
Evdale Zeynike is honoured, above all, as the king of the dengbej, the supreme master of the Kurdish bardic art, and by many as its very founder. Researchers who gathered the traditions about him in the lands where he lived found him remembered everywhere as the first and greatest of the dengbej, the source from which the whole Serhad school of singing flowed. While the art of the bard is surely older than any one man, Evdale Zeynike became its towering emblem, the figure to whom all later singers looked back as to a founding father.
It was the great novelist Yasar Kemal, himself of the region, who gave him his most famous title, calling him the Homer of the Kurds and naming him among his own intellectual fathers. The comparison reaches to the heart of what Evdale Zeynike was. Like Homer in the Greek tradition, he stands at the fountainhead of a whole body of oral poetry, a blind singer of heroes and wars and griefs whose voice shaped the imagination of his people and set the pattern that generations of singers would follow. To call him the Homer of the Kurds is to recognise that in him an entire literature found its first and greatest voice.
The Bard of the Pasha
For much of his life Evdale Zeynike was attached to the court of a powerful local lord, Surmeli Mehmed Pasha, the bey of Eleskirt, a ruler descended from the famous line associated with the great palace of Dogubayazit. In the world of that time, a great lord kept a dengbej as part of his household, a singer who would entertain the court, praise its triumphs, preserve its history and accompany its master on his journeys and his campaigns. Evdale Zeynike was such a bard to Surmeli Mehmed Pasha, and the connection shaped much of his life and his art.
As the Pasha's dengbej, he recorded in song the deeds and the campaigns of his lord, the journeys to far places and the events of the age, turning the history that unfolded around him into kilams that could be carried in memory and sung in the gatherings. This was one of the central functions of the court bard: to be the living chronicle of his lord and his people, the one who saw to it that what happened would be remembered. In serving the Pasha in this way, Evdale Zeynike became a witness to his times, and some of his most powerful songs grew directly from the events he lived through at his master's side.
The Campaign and the Lament
The most famous of these events was a distant and tragic military campaign in the year 1865. When the Ottoman government moved to suppress a revolt in the Kozan region, far to the west near Adana, it called upon Surmeli Mehmed Pasha for support, and the Pasha rode out with a force of cavalry to the distant south, taking his dengbej, Evdale Zeynike, with him. The campaign turned into a catastrophe for all sides. The suppression of the revolt brought terrible suffering to the local people, with great numbers displaced and killed, and then a cholera epidemic swept through the armies, destroying many of the soldiers and a large part of the Pasha's own cavalry.
Evdale Zeynike witnessed all of this, the long march, the violence and the dying, and he turned it into song, composing kilams for the stages of the journey and a great lament for the disaster and, in time, for the death of his Pasha. It is one of the poignant facts of that campaign that a celebrated poet of the Turkmen, Dadaloglu, was present amid the same events on another side, and that he too made the tragedy into epic verse; so that the same dreadful happening was lamented, in their different tongues, by two of the great folk poets of the age. In Evdale Zeynike's songs of that campaign, the dengbej tradition served its deepest purpose, preserving the memory of a real and terrible history in enduring art.
Blindness and Poverty
By the firm tradition of his people, Evdale Zeynike was blind, and his blindness became one of the great themes of his own songs. In an age without any safety net, a blind man, however gifted, was terribly vulnerable to poverty and dependence, and the tradition remembers the great bard fallen on hard times, reduced at the end to need and even to begging, his fame no protection against the hardships of his affliction and his age. Some of his most moving laments are said to have sprung from this very suffering, the songs of a blind old man who had given his people a treasure of music and yet knew want and humiliation.
There is a famous and bitter scene preserved in the tradition, in which the blind and aged bard, come to a spring, is mocked by a proud young woman who sees only a blind old beggar, until another recognises him for who he truly is, the great Evdale Zeynike, the dengbej of the Pasha, now blind and brought low. The scene captures the painful paradox of his life: that the man whose voice was the glory of his people could be, in his own person, an object of scorn to the thoughtless. In giving voice to that pain, his laments reach a depth of feeling that has moved listeners ever since, and they remind us that the beauty of his songs was wrung from real and lifelong hardship.
The Range of His Art
Though he is remembered above all for his epics and laments, the art of Evdale Zeynike ranged across the whole of human experience. He sang of love, with all its burning intensity, and he sang of war and heroism, of the deeds of lords and the fate of armies. He composed laments for the dead and for his own sorrows, and he was also, the tradition records, a master of satire, able to turn a sharp and biting wit upon the proud and the unjust. It was said of him that he made kilams out of all the realities of his society, that there was no part of life he could not turn into song.
This breadth is characteristic of the greatest dengbej, who were not merely entertainers but the poets, historians, satirists and moral voices of their communities all at once. In Evdale Zeynike this many-sided art reached its fullest flowering. Whether he was praising a hero, mourning a death, celebrating a love, mocking a tyrant or lamenting his own blindness, he brought to each the same depth of feeling and the same mastery of the sung word, and in the range of his work the whole life of his people is reflected as in a mirror.
The Voice That Was Saved
Because the dengbej tradition was oral, the songs of a singer could easily die with him, surviving only as long as other singers chose to carry them. Evdale Zeynike was fortunate in this, for his repertoire was kept alive by generations of dengbej who learned and sang his kilams, and in the twentieth century a great part of it was preserved through the Kurdish-language broadcasts of Radio Yerevan, which carried the old songs to listeners across the region and recorded them for the future. Through this chain of memory and broadcast, songs first sung in the nineteenth century can still be heard today.
This survival was not to be taken for granted, for the twentieth century was a hard one for the Kurdish oral tradition. In the decades after the founding of the modern states that divided the Kurdish lands, the public expression of Kurdish identity and language was often suppressed, and singers and their communities suffered displacement and worse. That the songs of Evdale Zeynike came through this era at all is a testament to the tenacity of the dengbej and of the people who treasured their songs, keeping a precious inheritance alive through times that were hostile to it.
Evdale Zeynike in Modern Literature
In our own time, Evdale Zeynike has passed from the world of oral song into that of modern literature, above all through the work of the great Kurdish novelist Mehmed Uzun. Uzun made the legendary bard the hero of his novel telling of a day in the life of Evdale Zeynike, narrated through the voice of another famed dengbej, and in doing so he carried the figure of the master-bard into the modern Kurdish novel, weaving the old oral tradition into a new literary form. It was part of a wider effort to gather and honour the inheritance of the dengbej within written Kurdish literature.
Mehmed Uzun himself, who lived from 1953 to 2007, was a major figure of modern Kurdish letters who spent long years in exile and was even prosecuted by the state for an essay he wrote on the Kurdish language, dying not long after his return home. Through his novel, Evdale Zeynike reached a new and worldwide readership. And the bard's legacy lived on in song as well as in books, in the great dengbej of later generations such as the renowned Sakiro and the Armenian-born master Karapete Xaco, the preserver of Filite Quto, who carried the tradition Evdale Zeynike had founded deep into the twentieth century.
Symbolism and Legacy
Evdale Zeynike has become far more than a historical singer; he is a symbol of the Kurdish oral tradition itself, and of the power of the human voice to preserve a people's soul. In his blindness he embodies the ancient image of the blind seer, the singer who, deprived of outer sight, sees all the more deeply into the heart of things; and in his mastery he embodies the dignity of an art that, lacking books and schools, entrusted the memory of a whole people to the trained voice and the faithful heart.
His legacy is the entire living tradition that flowed from him. Every dengbej of the Serhad highlands and beyond who has sung a kilam in the long, unaccompanied, melismatic style stands, in a sense, in his lineage, and every gathering where the old songs are still performed is a continuation of what he began. In an age when so much of the oral world has been lost, the survival and the honouring of Evdale Zeynike, in song, in scholarship and in literature, is a sign that the tradition he founded is not yet silent, and that the voice of the king of the dengbej still carries across the mountains.
Evdale Zeynike and the Kurdish Tradition
Evdale Zeynike stands at the head of the whole tradition of Kurdish sung narrative, the tradition that gave us the great destans and laments. The songs he and his successors carried include the historical epics such as Filite Quto and the lament of Dimdim, the tragic love-tales such as Siyabend u Xece and Zembilfiros, and the destans of honour such as Dewreshe Evdi. Through such songs the dengbej kept alive the memory of the Kurdish people across the centuries.
What sets Evdale Zeynike apart within this great tradition is his place at its very source and summit. He is not the singer of one famous tale but the master from whom a whole school of singing descends, the figure who, more than any other, gave the dengbej art its shape and its dignity. Alongside the written masterpiece of Mem u Zin, the oral art that Evdale Zeynike embodies forms one of the two great pillars of Kurdish literary heritage, the spoken and sung tradition standing beside the written one. To know him is to understand the living heart of Kurdish poetry.
Debates and Misconceptions
How much of his life is history and how much legend? The honest answer is that the two are deeply intertwined. Evdale Zeynike was certainly a real bard of the nineteenth-century Serhad region, attached to a real lord and a witness to real events, and researchers have gathered traditions about him from the lands where he lived. But his biography comes down to us largely through oral tradition, with all its embellishment, and even his dates are approximate, so that the figure we meet is part remembered history and part legend, and is best appreciated as both.
Was he truly the founder of the dengbej tradition? The art of the Kurdish bard is certainly older than any single person, reaching back long before the nineteenth century, so the claim that Evdale Zeynike founded it should be understood as a reverent tradition rather than a literal historical fact. What is true is that he became the supreme emblem and master of the dengbej art, the towering figure to whom the whole later tradition of the Serhad highlands looked back. He is its founder in the sense that matters most to a living tradition: the master who set its pattern and gave it its greatest example.
Is the title Homer of the Kurds to be taken literally? It is an honorific, given by the novelist Yasar Kemal, and it should be understood as a tribute to Evdale Zeynike's stature rather than a claim of literal equivalence. The comparison is illuminating because both figures are blind singers who stand at the fountainhead of a great tradition of oral epic, but Evdale Zeynike is his own distinct figure, rooted in the particular world of the Kurdish highlands. The title honours his greatness and his place at the source of Kurdish oral poetry, and in that sense it is wholly deserved.
Related Topics
The Dengbej: the Kurdish bardic tradition that Evdale Zeynike founded and embodies
Filite Quto: a great dengbej epic of tribal honour, carried by later masters
Siyabend u Xece: the tragic love-epic of the Kurdish oral tradition
The Lament of Dimdim: the sung memory of the siege of Dimdim fortress
Dewreshe Evdi: the destan of love and honour among the tribes
Mem u Zin: the written masterpiece beside the oral tradition of the dengbej
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Evdale Zeynike?
Evdale Zeynike was a legendary Kurdish dengbej, or bard, of the nineteenth century, born around 1800 in the Serhad region of the eastern highlands. Honoured as the king of the dengbej and the founder of the whole tradition, and called the Homer of the Kurds, he was the court bard of a local lord and the singer of his people's loves, wars and sorrows. His songs are still sung today.
Why is he called the son of Zeyne?
Because he lost his father when he was only about three years old and was raised in poverty by his mother, whose name was Zeyne. So closely was he bound to her that he took his name from her, becoming Evdale Zeynike, Evdal the son of Zeyne. It is fitting that so great a bard, in a tradition rooted in memory and the heart, should carry his mother's name in his own.
How did Evdale Zeynike become a singer?
According to a beloved legend, he was an ordinary farmer until the age of thirty and had never sung a single song. Then he had a powerful dream and fell gravely ill for many months. As he recovered, the melodies he sang from his sickbed were unlike anything heard before, and from that day he was a dengbej, the master from whom the whole Serhad tradition of singing descends.
Why is he called the Homer of the Kurds?
The great novelist Yasar Kemal gave him the title. Like Homer in the Greek tradition, Evdale Zeynike was a blind singer of heroes, wars and sorrows who stands at the fountainhead of a whole body of oral epic and shaped the imagination of his people. The title is a tribute to his stature and his place at the very source of Kurdish oral poetry.
Was Evdale Zeynike really blind?
By the firm tradition of his people, yes, he was blind, and his blindness became one of the great themes of his own songs. The tradition remembers him as a blind bard who, despite his fame, fell into poverty and hardship in his old age, and some of his most moving laments are said to have sprung from that suffering. His blindness also links him to the ancient image of the blind seer-poet.
How were his songs preserved?
His songs were carried by generations of dengbej who learned and sang them, and in the twentieth century a great part of his repertoire was preserved through the Kurdish-language broadcasts of Radio Yerevan. He was also immortalised in modern literature, above all in Mehmed Uzun's novel about a day in his life, so that the legendary bard lives on in both song and books.
References and Further Reading
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