Every Friday, musician Enes Salman performs the Sevdalinka, an ancient form of love song from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Sevdalinka was recently included in UNESCO’s National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. UNESCO is The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Sevdalinka is often called the Balkan Blues. It is a somewhat sad form of urban love song that dates to the 1500s. It is a mix of South Slavic spoken poetry and music of the Ottoman Empire.
Salman is among only a few musicians keeping the tradition alive.
“I have been playing and singing Sevdalinka since I was 14,” he said before a recent performance.
Sevdalinka is often performed a cappella. That means it is sung without musical instruments. Sometimes the performer sings with traditional instruments like a lute. This form, or genre, of music has been carried from generation to generation through performances at family gatherings.
In recent years, younger musicians have brought modern versions of Sevdalinka to audiences around the world.
One of them is Damir Imamovic. His father and grandfather were famous Sevdalinka performers. In 2020 and 2021, Imamovic won awards from two world music publications, Songlines and Transglobal, for best European album.
Imamovic supports Sevdalinka internationally through his SevdahLab project. The project helped build support for the music’s inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.
“I realized how little the public knows about the Sevdalinka genre and wanted to reveal the story behind that music,” he said.
Zanin Berbic is a 28-year-old ethno-musicologist. He works as a curator in the music department of Bosnia’s Regional Museum in Sarajevo, organizing, protecting, and bringing attention to music. He also plays saz, a long-necked lute used in Ottoman classical music. He said that Sevdalinka tells the story of Bosnia’s history.
Berbic said, “Most of my days I spend either singing or playing Sevdalinka songs or reading or talking about them. Sevdalinka is my life,” he said.
I’m Anna Matteo.
Daria Sito-Sucic reported this story for Reuters from Sarajevo. Anna Matteo adapted it for VOA Learning English.
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Words in This Story
a cappella –foreign term (music) singing without musical instruments
genre –n. a form of art that is distinct from others
audience –n. people who listen to a performance in a theater, on television or a public place
ethno-musicology -n. the study of music in a sociocultural context; the study of ethnic music
curator –n. a person who oversees a collection of certain kinds of objects