DANUK: bringing Syrian Kurdish music back to life

In 2013, one of our colleagues was walking down Istanbul’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, Istiklal Street, on a cold winter night, when he came across a group of Syrian Kurdish refugees busking in the rain to make money. Befriending them having been enthralled by their music, he visited the group in what passed for home in an old abandoned property on the Asian side of Istanbul. Here they had to collect wood for their stove and sometimes resort to burning their clothes in the old chimney to keep warm. Despite their humble situation, the group were fine arts and music graduates from Syria’s best universities. They had managed to bring their musical instruments, books and old music scores with them as they fled Syria on foot and were now using their talent to secure meagre resources in their bid to survive. Their talent was immediately apparent, and we hired them to make film and radio scores as well as compose music for videos and documentaries. They used the money from this work to buy equipment and open a small recording studio. Soon they were playing local festivals in Turkey, before securing refugee status overseas and settling in Spain. The group, known as Danuk, reunited there and have now embarked on the most extraordinary project with the support of the British Arts Council – bringing back to life for the first time in a century Syrian Kurdish music saved on phonograph 100 years earlier by anthropologists. More about this extraordinary endeavour can be seen here:

The trailer provides the backstory to the original recordings: "In 1902, Felix Von Luschan, a doctor, anthropologist, explorer, archaeologist and the director of the Ethnographic Museum of Berlin at the time, took a phonograph with him on an expedition to excavations in Sendshirli (present day Turkey), where he recorded Turkish and Kurdish songs. Some years later in 1912 while in Jerusalem, Dr Gustav Klameth, a German religion student and explorer, recorded a Syrian priest from Mardin (present-day Turkey) singing three songs in the Kurdish language. Today, these recordings are preserved in the form of wax cylinders in the Berlin Phonograpf Archiv and in the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna. Behind closed doors, stored and labelled far away from their origin, only a few researchers have accessed them since.  This project reunited the Danuk band with the songs captured in their homeland and language more than 100 years ago. The process consisted in accessing the recording from the archives in Berlin and Vienna, reinterpreting/recomposing the songs with the guidance of two Kurdish academic mentors, and finally recording them alongside fellow middle eastern musicians currently living in the diaspora across Europe’.

This is the first in the series of a dozen posts that commemorate ten years of the Syrian conflict, but not by focusing on the grim tally, the futility of the astounding loss or the ongoing degradation of the Syrian people. Instead, we want to share some stories of incredible Syrian refugees we have worked with and who are now, from Spain and France to Sweden and Canada, enriching their adopted communities whilst celebrating their culture, language, history and, as is evidenced by Danuk, extraordinary talent.