An Ancient Breath - Yazidi Laments

Considering today's Yazidis living together with different cultures, religions and languages in geographies with dissimilar characteristics, it is becoming more and more difficult to talk about the existence of a monolithic Yazidi faith. This situation opens the doors to a different form of extinction for the Yazidis, who have moved away from their internal integrity, especially in the last hundred years, but have become closer to the cultures surrounding the community. The fact that reading and writing was prohibited until recently, that all religious and cultural information was transferred orally from generation to generation, and that existing oral culture products could not be recorded have further deepened the existing problems. In this state, it is no longer possible to keep a tally of prayers, tales and couplets that have been forgotten or changed over time. This work, titled An Ancient Breath: Yazidi Lamentations, is the product of an effort to record the core of the oral culture of the Yazidi community, which is dispersed in different geographies, to create an important resource for ongoing studies by presenting the existing differences together, and to prevent, at least a little, cultural extinction. This meticulous study, which includes Amed Gökçen's analysis of Yazidi oral culture, consists of folk songs, qewls, couplets, tales, sermons and prayers recorded during field studies carried out in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Georgia, Armenia and Germany since 2004. It will fill an important gap with 7 CDs. Prepared for publication in order to facilitate the understanding of Yazidi oral culture, Kadim Bir Nefes: Yazidi Lamentations is also the largest published audio recording archive about Yazidis. Istanbul Bilgi University Publications is happy to bring such a study to our cultural life.
(From the Promotional Bulletin)



Number of Pages: 200

Year of Printing: 2015


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Istanbul Bilgi University Publications

First Printing Year: 2015

Number of Pages: 200

Language Turkish