Sakiro: The Voice of the Serhad
- Dala Sarkis
- 21 minutes ago
- 13 min read
Introduction
If one voice carried the art of the Kurdish dengbej into the modern age, it was the voice of Sakiro. Born Sakir Deniz in the highlands of the Serhad region, he became the most celebrated Kurdish bard of the twentieth century, honoured by his people as the Sahe Dengbejan, the king of the dengbej, the title once given to the legendary Evdale Zeynike himself. His powerful voice, capable of singing for hours and even days without pause, became for millions of Kurds the very sound of their language and their memory.
Sakiro's life spanned a hard and turbulent century. His family knew displacement and exile; he himself was sent into a long internal exile as a young man; and he sang his songs in an age when the public use of the Kurdish language was forbidden, so that his recordings had to be made and shared in secret. That his art survived at all, and that it reached the whole of the Kurdish world, is a testament to his genius and to the devotion of those who treasured his voice.
He stands at the end of a great chain of masters, the heir of a tradition handed down from teacher to pupil across the generations, and he carried that inheritance faithfully to the end of his life. Yet he died in poverty and disappointment, feeling that his people had not valued their dengbej as they should. His story is therefore one of both glory and sorrow: the tale of the greatest voice of his age, and of the neglect that shadowed its final years.
Contents
Who Was Sakiro?
Sakiro, born Sakir Deniz and living from 1936 to 1996, was the most renowned Kurdish dengbej of the twentieth century, a singer of the Serhad highlands celebrated for his powerful voice and his vast repertoire of kilams. A student of the master dengbej Resoye Gopala, and through him an heir of the tradition of Evdale Zeynike, he carried hundreds of songs of love, history and lament, and he kept Kurdish oral culture alive through an era of exile and of bans on the Kurdish language. Honoured as the king of the dengbej, he is one of the towering figures of Kurdish music.
The King of the Dengbej
Among the Kurds, Sakiro is known by a series of honorific names that capture his stature. He is the Sahe Dengbejan, the king or shah of the dengbej; he is Kewe Ribat, the partridge of Ribat, a tribute to the beauty of his voice; and he is Sakire Mezin, Sakiro the Great. These titles place him at the very summit of his art, the supreme dengbej of the modern era and the standard against which others are measured.
In bearing the title of king of the dengbej, Sakiro took up a name that had belonged to the legendary Evdale Zeynike, the founder of the Serhad tradition a century before him. It was a fitting inheritance, for Sakiro was, in a real and traceable sense, the heir of that tradition, and he became for the twentieth century what Evdale Zeynike had been for the nineteenth: the greatest voice of his age, the singer in whom the whole art of the dengbej found its fullest expression. Where Evdale Zeynike was the king of the old world of the gathering and the court, Sakiro was the king of the new world of the cassette and the radio.
Key Takeaways
Sakiro, born Sakir Deniz, was the most famous Kurdish dengbej of the twentieth century.
He was honoured as the Sahe Dengbejan, the king of the dengbej.
He studied under the master Resoye Gopala, an heir of Evdale Zeynike's tradition.
His family was shaped by displacement, and he was exiled to Adana in 1959.
He recorded around 65 cassettes during the years of the Kurdish language ban.
He died in poverty in Izmir in 1996, feeling neglected by his people.
Quick Facts
Name: Sakiro (born Sakir Deniz); also Sakire Mezin, Sakiro the Great
Lived: 1936 to 1996 (some accounts say born 1931)
Born: A village in the Eleskirt district of Agri, in the Serhad region
Type: Dengbej, a Kurdish bard and singer of kilams
Titles: Sahe Dengbejan, King of the Dengbej; Kewe Ribat, the Partridge
Teacher: A student of the master dengbej Resoye Gopala
Lineage: Reso was himself a student of Evdale Zeynike
Voice: Famed for singing for hours without pause, in a high, powerful style
Recordings: Around 65 cassettes, distributed in the years of the language ban
Died: In Izmir in 1996, in poverty; his grave is still visited
A Family in Exile
Sakiro was born on the twenty-fifth of December, 1936, by the usual account, though some say he was born a few years earlier, in a village of the Eleskirt district of Agri, in the Serhad highlands of the far east. He spent much of his youth in the nearby village of Cemalverdi, the very district associated with the great Evdale Zeynike, and there he was steeped from childhood in the songs of the dengbej. His family belonged to the Zilan tribal confederation, one of the great tribal groupings of the region.
His family's history was marked by displacement and loss, as was the history of so many Kurdish families of that time and place. His forebears had been uprooted and had moved across the troubled borderlands of the region, and the family was deeply affected by the violent events that struck the Zilan valley around 1930, in the aftermath of one of the great Kurdish uprisings of the early twentieth century. Sakiro was thus born into a world of upheaval, and the experience of exile and survival that ran through his family's story would also run through his own life and his songs.
The Exile of 1959
The hardest blow of Sakiro's early life came in 1959, when he was a young man. In that year he and his entire family were sent into internal exile, forcibly removed from their highland homeland and resettled far away in the region of Adana, in the south, as part of the policies then directed at certain Kurdish families. There they remained for seven long years, far from the mountains and the communities that had given birth to their songs.
Only in 1966 was the family at last able to return, first to Mus, and then, two years later, to settle in the Karayazi district of Erzurum. The long exile left its mark, both on the man and on his art, deepening the strain of sorrow and longing that runs through so much of the dengbej tradition. Sakiro knew in his own life the displacement and yearning for home that the old songs expressed, and this lived experience gave his singing a depth and an authenticity that listeners felt in every note.
The Master Line
Sakiro's greatness did not arise in isolation; it came to him through a direct line of masters, the living chain by which the art of the dengbej was handed down. After the family's return from exile, he became the student of the renowned dengbej Resoye Gopala, known simply as Dengbej Reso, one of the supreme bards of the Serhad region. Reso saw the gift in the young Sakiro and nurtured it, and Sakiro learned from him a great part of his art and his repertoire.
And Reso himself had stood in the same line of descent, for he was an inheritor of the tradition of Evdale Zeynike, the founding master of the Serhad school. Thus there runs a clear and beautiful line of transmission, from Evdale Zeynike in the nineteenth century, through Dengbej Reso, to Sakiro in the twentieth: master to pupil, voice to voice, across a hundred years. In learning from Reso, Sakiro was not merely acquiring songs but taking his place in a living tradition, becoming the latest bearer of an art passed down through the generations. He sang many of the kilams of both Reso and Evdale Zeynike, keeping their voices alive within his own.
The Voice
What set Sakiro above all his contemporaries was, above everything, his voice. It was a voice of extraordinary power and range, able to sustain high and resonant notes with a clarity and an endurance that astonished all who heard it. Most famously, he could sing for hours on end, and by some accounts for days, pouring out kilam after kilam without pause or repetition, a feat of memory and stamina that few singers in any tradition could match.
He was also a master of a rare and difficult vocal technique, a kind of ornamented throat-singing with a distinctive catching of the breath, which very few dengbej could perform and which became one of the signatures of his style. His singing belonged to the classic manner of the Serhad highlands, unaccompanied by any instrument, the naked human voice carrying the whole weight of the song, pushing the very limits of the breath. In that bare and demanding style, Sakiro was supreme, and his voice alone could hold a gathering spellbound through a long winter night.
The Songs He Carried
Sakiro's repertoire was vast, numbering in the hundreds of kilams. He sang his own compositions, among them songs touching on the history and the sufferings of his people, and a great body of love songs and wedding songs; and he sang the inherited treasures of the tradition, the kilams of Reso and of Evdale Zeynike, and the great narrative songs of the Kurds. Through him passed the whole world of the dengbej repertoire, the love-tales and the laments, the songs of heroes and of history, including the matter of the great destans such as Mem u Zin and Siyabend u Xece.
Among his most beloved songs are kilams whose names are treasured by those who love Kurdish music, songs of love and longing, of feuds and battles, and laments for the tragedies of his people, including a famous lament for the sorrows of the Zilan valley from which his own family came. Like the historical songs of Dimdim, these kilams preserved the memory of real events and real grief. In carrying so many songs, of his own and of his masters, Sakiro became a living library of the Kurdish oral tradition, and his recordings remain one of the richest treasuries of that tradition that we possess.
Singing Under the Ban
Sakiro practised his art in a difficult age. Through much of his life, the public use of the Kurdish language was banned or severely restricted in Turkey, where he lived, and to sing in Kurdish was to risk the attention of the authorities. There were no Kurdish record companies or radio stations freely available to him as there had been, in another country, for Meryem Xan in Baghdad. Instead, his songs had to be preserved by other means, in secret.
The means was the cassette tape. When word spread that Sakiro was coming to a village, people would ready their cassette recorders, and as he sang they would record his kilams, so that his voice could be copied and passed from hand to hand across the Kurdish lands. In this way some sixty-five cassettes of his songs were made and circulated, often clandestinely, for the very act of recording and sharing Kurdish songs could bring arrest and punishment. Through this humble technology, and at real risk, the voice of Sakiro reached the whole Kurdish world and was saved for the future, much as the recordings of the great Karapete Xaco preserved another part of the tradition. The cassette became, for a banned culture, an instrument of survival.
Bitterness and Neglect
For all his fame, the end of Sakiro's life was marked by hardship and disappointment. He spent his final decade in the western city of Izmir, far from his highland home, and he died there in 1996 in poverty and difficult circumstances, the greatest voice of his people reduced to want in his last years. It is one of the saddest facts of his story that so towering an artist should have ended his life in such need.
In his final years Sakiro grew bitter, not toward the world at large but toward his own people, feeling that the Kurds had failed to value and protect their dengbej as they should. He is remembered to have said, in his disappointment, that other peoples cherished and celebrated their great folk singers and made them known to the world, while the Kurds let their own masters die in hunger and neglect, pointing to the example of his own teacher's hard end. Whatever the justice of his complaint, it expressed a real and painful truth about the precariousness of the dengbej's life and the fragility of an oral heritage that depended on the care of the community to survive. He died feeling that the treasure he carried had not been honoured as it deserved.
Symbolism and Legacy
Sakiro has become a symbol of the endurance of Kurdish memory and language through an age of suppression. In an era when his language was banned and his people's culture was under pressure, he sang, and his voice carried the history, the sorrows and the joys of the Kurds to listeners who could hear them nowhere else. He stands for the power of song to keep a culture alive when other channels are closed, and for the dignity of an art that refused to be silenced.
His legacy endures and even grows. His recordings, once shared in secret, are now treasured and studied, and they serve as a school for those who wish to learn the art of the dengbej, much as he once learned from the recordings and the living voice of his own masters. A foundation has been established in his name to preserve the dengbej culture, his grave in Izmir is still visited by those who honour him, and there have been calls to bring his remains home to the highlands of Agri, as a symbol of the Kurds reclaiming and cherishing their cultural roots. In death, the honour he felt denied in life has begun to be restored.
Sakiro and the Kurds
Sakiro holds a place of deep affection and reverence in the Kurdish world, as the voice that carried the tradition of the dengbej through the hardest decades of the twentieth century. For a people who have preserved their identity above all through song, in the long periods when other means were denied them, he was more than an entertainer; he was a keeper of memory, a defender of language, and a source of pride and consolation. His kilams were, for countless Kurdish families, the cherished sound of their own culture in their own homes, brought to them on the cassettes that carried his voice. He stands beside Evdale Zeynike as one of the two supreme masters of the Serhad tradition.
In his life are gathered many of the great themes of the modern Kurdish experience: the displacement and exile, the suppression of language and culture, the survival of heritage against the odds, and the tension between an artist's fame and the neglect that could still leave him in poverty. To remember Sakiro is to remember not only a magnificent voice but a whole chapter of his people's history, and to honour the tradition he served is to keep faith with the inheritance he carried at such cost.
Debates and Misconceptions
Was Sakiro really the king of the dengbej? The title is an honorific, an expression of the love and esteem in which he was held, rather than any formal rank. It had been given before him to the founding master Evdale Zeynike, and to call Sakiro by it is to recognise him as the supreme dengbej of his own age and the heir of that great tradition. It honours his stature, and in that sense it is wholly deserved, but it should be understood as a tribute rather than a literal throne.
When was he born? The usual date given is 1936, but some accounts suggest he may have been born a few years earlier, around 1931. The uncertainty is typical of figures born in rural communities in that period, where records were not always kept, and it is most honest simply to note that the exact year is not certain while the broad span of his life is clear.
Was Sakiro a political figure? He was first and foremost a singer and a keeper of the dengbej tradition, not a politician. But because he sang in Kurdish in an age when that language was banned, and because some of his songs touched on the history and the sufferings of his people, his art carried an inevitable significance beyond mere entertainment. To sing one's forbidden language and one's people's history was, in that context, an act of cultural preservation with its own weight. It is most accurate to see him as an artist whose faithful practice of his tradition gave his work meaning, rather than as a political activist; his songs were acts of memory, and memory itself had become precious and embattled.
Related Topics
Evdale Zeynike: the founding king of the dengbej, master of the tradition Sakiro inherited
The Dengbej: the Kurdish bardic tradition that Sakiro carried into the modern age
Meryem Xan: the pioneering female singer who recorded in another era and country
Filite Quto: the destan preserved by Karapete Xaco, a fellow great dengbej
Mem u Zin: the great Kurdish love-epic of the sung tradition
Cembeli: the mountain love-epic of the kind carried by the dengbej
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Sakiro?
Sakiro, born Sakir Deniz and living from 1936 to 1996, was the most renowned Kurdish dengbej of the twentieth century, a singer of the Serhad highlands famed for his powerful voice and vast repertoire of kilams. A student of the master Resoye Gopala and an heir of the tradition of Evdale Zeynike, he was honoured as the king of the dengbej and kept Kurdish song alive through exile and the years of the language ban.
Why is Sakiro called the king of the dengbej?
The title Sahe Dengbejan, king of the dengbej, is an honorific expressing the esteem in which he was held as the supreme dengbej of his age. It had earlier been given to the founding master Evdale Zeynike, and applying it to Sakiro recognises him as the heir of that tradition and the greatest voice of the twentieth century. It is a tribute to his stature rather than a formal rank.
Who was Sakiro's teacher?
Sakiro studied under the renowned dengbej Resoye Gopala, known as Dengbej Reso, one of the great bards of the Serhad region, after his family returned from exile in the 1960s. Reso was himself an inheritor of the tradition of Evdale Zeynike, so that Sakiro stood in a direct line of masters reaching back through the nineteenth century.
Why was Sakiro exiled?
In 1959, Sakiro and his entire family were sent into internal exile to the Adana region as part of the policies then directed at certain Kurdish families, far from their highland home. They remained there for seven years before being allowed to return in 1966. The experience of exile and longing for home deeply marked both his life and his singing.
How were Sakiro's songs preserved?
Because the public use of Kurdish was banned in Turkey during his life, Sakiro's songs could not be released through ordinary channels. Instead, people recorded his kilams on cassette tapes when he performed, often in secret, and these cassettes, around sixty-five in number, were copied and shared across the Kurdish world, at real risk, preserving his voice for the future.
How did Sakiro die?
Sakiro spent his final decade in Izmir and died there in 1996 in poverty and hardship. In his last years he grew bitter, feeling that the Kurds had failed to value and protect their dengbej as other peoples cherished their great singers. He died disappointed, though his reputation and the honour due to him have grown greatly since his death.
References and Further Reading
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