Believe it or not they do exist - like ghosts in our consciousness. Few people really know who they actually are, but everyone respects these apparitions whom we often associate with Taras Shevchenko's "Kobzar" or the mythical Zaporozhtsi. Who knows whether they ever existed..?
Wandering around Kyiv somewhere in the area of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra or St. Sophia's Cathedral, we often see people playing the bandura and singing Ukrainian folk songs. They are usually old and blind, but sometimes surprisingly young. A crowd of onlookers gathers around them. Some drop small change into the guitar case or hat lying nearby, but most people just walk on past the kobzars without even paying attention to them. Foreigners, however, show more interest. But for some reasons everyone thinks these strange people are just vagrant musicians who roam in thousands around the world. Very few people realize that things are actually not so simple. These strange singers are everything that has remained from a unique musical tradition with centuries-long roots.
But let's take a look at how this came about
In today's confused world, more and more people are getting interested in the past, trying to find remedies for the jillions of present-day problems. The amazing popularity of fantasy books like Harry Potter or "Lord of the Rings" is proof of this. People are reading epics like the Scandinavian Kalevala, the Indian Veda, and the Central Asian Mugami and Mukomi. People are looking for old melodies forgotten by everyone, trying to restore traditions and revive languages. How can one explain the present popularity of Celtic, Norman, Scandinavian and Gothic music - is this just a commercial stunt? I doubt it. Mass youth movements and sub cultures have even begun to spring up on the basis of these trends, leading to festivals and the purchase of hundreds of thousands of CDs. From the distant past, people are striving to learn something that was lost in the rubble.
Interest in bygone times is evident in Ukraine too. However, our more recent Soviet past often presents an obstacle to understanding them, as it has become a part of our consciousness. Ukrainian culture is perceived as something uninteresting and not worthy of attention. It is more often associated with women wearing head scarves and singing songs about dumplings. At the same time, Ukrainians have the oldest song culture in recorded or reproduced form. This culture is living, though it has every chance of soon becoming extinct.
Today, few people know that so called Russian folk tales were created and sung here in Ukraine, in the hills surrounding Kyiv. And contemporary kobzars, whom one can still hear in Kyiv, continue the traditions of those singers who for thousand of years played the gusli around Kyiv markets. At one time, gusli were considered to be a separate musical instrument. But the latest research indicates that the bandura is a transformed gusli with an additional lute-like handle.
Who are the kobzars then?
The Kobzars were old blind men who wandered with kobzas on their backs from village to village and sang on squares, in markets or near churches. And they didn't just sing songs.
Kobzars were very religious and conscientious people who performed old folk tales, psalms and dumas (also called Cossack psalms). They were also former warriors crippled during never-ending wars who couldn't hold a saber any more. They sang in a specialized style stories about wars and Turkish captivity, about battles, exploits, and treason. The kobzars taught people in song not to forget their roots or ancestors. They taught people to fight for their future. Often the kobzars' songs were "stronger" than hundreds of armed Zaporizhian Cossacks because they gave Ukrainians suffering under foreign oppression the will to live on.
For exactly these reasons, the kobzars were never liked by invaders. Only in the mid 1930s did the Soviets manage to destroy them, and even they didn't destroy them completely. There are reports that the kobzars were called to a gathering in Kharkiv, where they were all taken outside the city, thrown into a pit and doused with water. Blind and helpless, they were left to freeze to death in sub zero temperature. Of course many more Ukrainian kobzars had already died by that time - during the artificially created Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933.
Ukrainian conscience and memory
Already by the 13th century, the first capella of bandura players had been created at the court of the Polish monarchy. The monarch reasoned that if he could gather the wandering minstrels together in one place, then he could control them and avoid unpleasantries like riots and rebellions. The fact is that the kobzars lived according to well-defined rules. All the same, each one had a personality of his own: his voice, singing manner and bandura were all unique. To gather them into a single orchestra where they would tune their instruments to sound the same and sing the same song meant death to their art. Starting in the 13th century, the mighty of this world tried to tame, organize, bribe and collectivize the kobzars - making them into musical court jesters. And when the mighty of this world failed, they tried to annihilate them.
The Russian 18th century empress Elizabeth fell in love with a kobzar named Lyubystok. Nevertheless, he ran away from her court three times. Each time he was caught and forcefully brought back. Eventually, he was seduced by the leftovers from the czaress's table and became a great Russian diplomat and, in the end, the last hetman of Ukraine. His real name was Kyrylo Rozumovskiy.
One czar presented a kobzar named Veresai with a silver snuffbox, for which he was kicked out of the kobzar guild - not because he had accepted the gift, but because he afterwards walked around and boasted about it. This was forbidden under kobzar etiquette. In general, kobzars had very strict regulations, thanks to which the tradition was preserved. For example, they were not allowed to replace the words in songs with their own words. There were also not accepted in Galicia. Kobzars there were considered Cossack spies. Lyric singers were allowed there, but they were considered beggars by the locals, unlike the Kobzars, who were known as political figures. In Galicia, they were executed on the bloc on central squares.
Kobzars "live"
Earlier this year, a second "kobzar" CD was released under a project called "My Ukraine Bervy" by the art-agency Art Veles. The CD is called "Taras Kompanichenko. Narodna bandura, lira" and it's a collection of works from the kobzar-lyrnyky tradition. The first CD was by Mykola Budnyk, who actually restored kobzar art in its authentic form, having learned the tradition from a 90-year old kobzar named Heorhiy Tkachenko.
Now, one can hear recordings of what was thought to have disappeared forever. Listening to hundred-year-old songs performed in a unique manner, one gets a strange feeling. The Zaporizhian Cossack's shadow appears on the walls of your apartment and you are carried away to another world where arrows whistle past your ears, sabers break and eternity "breathes" from a wild steppe.
It turns out that even in our day and age there are people who make traditional musical instruments, who walk around with kobzas or lyres on their backs, who sing dumas and psalms. But the main thing is to listen to them with pleasure. People like it. There is a plan - to release about 10 CDs of kobzar music under the project "My Ukraine Bervy". In addition, collections of authentic Ukrainian folklore from different regions of Ukraine are coming out in multimedia form - peculiar encyclopedias of the Polissya, Podillya and Hutsul'shchyna regions. You can see and hear it all on the Internet at www.ukrfolk.kiev.ua . The Web page is updated every time a new CD is released.
What is all this for?
The chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, William Ferris, once said: "You have to start from the most important things - preservation of cultural resources that bear the history of the country. As soon as books, documents and other archive materials where a people's history are written disappear, then you can consider that that history is lost forever, irrevocably. That is, it's very important to make sure that these recollections are preserved, that they are safe".
And one more thing... Unfortunately, no one knows whether future generations will have a chance to hear the work of the kobzars live. Without the kobzar it will be impossible to understand what Ukraine is about.
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