“Some voices do not disappear. They simply whisper from within, more deeply.”
A city’s memory is not always preserved in stone or archives. Sometimes it lives in a melody. Istanbul’s past is often told through the stories of empires, demolished neighborhoods, and transformed districts. Yet this city has another layer of memory: sound.
It is invisible to the eye, heard by the ear, immortalized in memory. In church hymns, wedding songs, gatherings at home, in the sound left behind from the everyday noise spilling into the streets. Armenian-language oral music is one of Istanbul’s oldest yet least spoken-about memories.
Armenian-language oral music is not merely an aesthetic production; it is a way of remembering. Extending from church hymns to the ashugh tradition, from laments of exile to the modern sounds of the diaspora, this music carries the ruptures, migrations, and continuity of a people.
When language becomes melody, history does not fall silent; it simply changes form.
In Istanbul, some voices do not disappear. They simply change places. Sometimes they are heard again in a church courtyard in Kumkapı, sometimes at a wedding in Samatya, and sometimes in a melody spilling out from a room in an old apartment in Beyoğlu.
This music is not a folklore display. It is a living layer of memory.
No melody was born alone on these lands. Armenian melodies came into contact with Kurdish dengbêj narratives, formed affinities with the resonance of Syriac hymns, and flowed alongside the modal movements of Anatolian folk songs. Long before the divisions, voices were already intertwined.
Then came a rupture. It was not only people who were scattered, muted, and displaced; voices were too. After 1915, Armenian-language oral music split into two paths: the inward-turned voice of those who remained in Istanbul and the louder memory carried into the diaspora. The voice that remained in this city has shrunk. It withdrew from large halls into small rooms, from public squares into enclosed courtyards. But it did not disappear. Because music is the most stubborn form of existence.
One of the most important witnesses to this memory is Gomidas Vardapet. He did not merely collect melodies; he recorded the sound map of this geography. In his notebooks, languages stand side by side: Kurdish, Armenian, Turkish… They simply turn the page; they do not separate from one another.
Today, Armenian-language oral music may not be highly visible in Turkey. But visibility does not always mean existence. The fact that a language continues to be sung as a song, that an instrument still breathes, that a melody is played inside a home, even if only in a whisper, is a powerful form of continuity.
The sounds of Istanbul overlap with one another. The sound of bells mingles with the call to prayer, the ferry’s whistle with the cry of seagulls, an old hymn with a street song. Armenian-language oral music is also part of this mixture.
The city has changed. People disappeared. But the sound did not vanish completely. Because sound is the most enduring form of memory. Some cities remember not through history, but through sound. A duduk rising in Istanbul, I believe, is one of them.
Author’s note: This article is an attempt to remember the traces of Armenian-language oral music within Istanbul’s multilayered cultural memory and the continuity of the voices that still circulate through the city.
