Bards of the Nation?: Ashugh Culture in Tiflis/Tbilisi around 1900

• In Event: Music, Modernity, and the Nation on the Fringes of Late Tsarist Russia: Perspectives from the Caucasus and Manchuria

Abstract

Ashughs, often itinerant singer-poets, were an integral part of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century entertainment and folk culture of a vast region, stretching from Anatolia to the Caspian Sea and from the Volga delta to today’s Northern Iran. Tiflis/Tbilisi, as the political and cultural centre of the Caucasus under Russian rule, was a hub both for traveling and resident ashughs alike, the latter being organized in a professional guild (amkari/hamkar). While Tiflis ashugh culture had for centuries been part of a highly conventionalized Turko-Persianate cultural framework that existed beyond political, ethnic, and religious borders, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it gradually transformed into a culture that demarcated precisely these boundaries. This paper will follow this process – at first by outlining how members of the local intelligentsia, predominantly Armenians who had studied in the Russian metropolis or in Western Europe, romanticized ashughs as the voice of the “simple people” and set out to publish collections of ashugh songs. In a second step, it will focus on two contrasting Tiflis ashugh figures, Ashugh Hazira (Armenian-Georgian, 1845–1922) and Ashugh Jivani (Armenian, 1846–1909), tracing how ideas of the nation, patriotism, nationalism, and progress increasingly penetrated the ashugh song repertoire itself, thus turning figures embedded in local traditions into potential national heroes.

Author

• Jonas Alexander Loeffler, U of Cologne (Germany)