Aram Tigran

About Aram Tigran

Aram Tigran was an Armenian singer and oud player who became one of the best-loved voices of Kurdish music, recording hundreds of songs in Kurmanji. He was born Aram Melikyan in 1934 in Qamishli, northeastern Syria, to an Armenian family whose parents came from villages near Diyarbakır. He took up the oud as a child and began performing at Kurdish and Armenian celebrations in the early 1950s, and as a young man he was already singing in Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian and Syriac.

In 1966 he moved to Yerevan in Soviet Armenia, where for around eighteen years he worked with the Kurdish service of Radio Yerevan, one of the few broadcasters of Kurdish music at a time when it was suppressed elsewhere. He later moved to Greece and settled in Athens. His repertoire of love songs, laments and patriotic anthems, accompanied on oud and cümbüş, made him a household name among Kurds, and songs such as Ay Dilberê, Şev Çû, Bilbilo, Zîlan and Ey Welato Em Heliyan are still widely sung.

In 2009 he visited his parents' home villages, was welcomed in Diyarbakır and sang at Newroz in Batman. He died in Athens in August 2009. He had asked to be buried in Diyarbakır, but Turkish authorities did not grant permission, and he was buried in Brussels with soil from Diyarbakır placed in his grave. For many Kurds and Armenians he remains a symbol of the culture the two peoples share.

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