Folklore
The Kyrgyz folklore is a versatile genre. In addition to ritual songs and lyric genre, it contains the so-called sanat and nasyyat - a moralizing verbal poetry, proverbs and sayings, riddles and fairy tails, myths and legends.

There is a myth about the origin of the name of the Kyrgyz people. The word “Kyrgyz” consists of two words: “Kyrk” and “ Kyz” that mean “forty” and “girl”, forty girls that became pregnant having drunk a foamy water from a river and gave birth to Kyrgyzians.

The Kyrgyz epic is rooted into the depth of ages and narrates about the life and heroic deeds of Kyrgyz batyrs and portentous events in history. Polished and enriched during many ages the Kyrgyz epic reached a high expressiveness, originality, and national aesthetic integrity. The following epics became famous: “Er Tyushtyuk”, “Kodjodjash”, “Er Tabyldy”, “Oldjobaiy and Kishimjan”, “Sarynji - Byekei”, “Janyl Myrza”, “Kurmanbek”, “Janysh-Baiysh”, and “Kedeikan”.

A special place belongs to Manas epic trilogy that is referred to as the Kyrgyz encyclopedia. It widely depicts the history, geographic knowledge, notion of environmental nature, religious conception, ethnic composition of the Kyrgyz people, their way of life, customs, philosophic and ethical views, opinions of human merits and vices, ethical style, poetry and language of the Kyrgyz people.

Manas has a thousand year history and surpasses in volume many of the famous world epics. It is composed fully of verses numbering 500 thousand poetic lines.

The idea inspiration of the epic is related to uncompromising struggle of the Kyrgyzians for their freedom and perspectives to uniting peoples. A leader and inspirer of the people is Manas batyr. All the events of this epic trilogy are developing around this main character. The trilogy consists of three heroic poems:
Manas, Semetei, and Seitek. Manas epic is a bright pattern of a folk creative work that involves a word, melody, and elements of performing art.

A manaschi - story-teller of Manas - performs the epic in a singing voice without being accompanied by any musical instrument. The melody of the epic consists of various recitative intonations. The manaschi keeps changing the tempo and dynamics of narration and intonation, makes accents depending on the content of that or other fragment of epic. The rhythm of melody is integrally connected with a syllabic structure of the wording and frequently depends on it. Patters alternate with heroic intonations in melodies of Manas. The performance of Manas gathered a large crowd and might last several days and even weeks and was celebrated by people as an important artistic event.

The famous manaschi are Nooruz, Jaisan-yrchy, K. Barybosov, Ch. Omurov, T. Japiev, B. Kumarov, S. Orosbakov, Togolok Moldo, S. Karalaev and others.


Kyrgyzstan travel