Few singers are remembered as much for one evening as for a whole career. Ahmet Kaya is one of them. For fifteen years he was one of Turkey's best-selling musicians, a bağlama player whose husky voice and protest ballads filled concert halls and cassette stalls. Then, in February 1999, he said on live television that he wanted to sing a song in Kurdish. Within months he was in exile, and within two years he was dead in Paris at the age of 43.
This Ahmet Kaya biography follows the whole story: the boy from Malatya, the songs that made him famous, the night that changed everything, and why Kurds from Diyarbakır to Sulaymaniyah still sing him today.
Ahmet Kaya: quick facts
- Born: 28 October 1957, Malatya, Turkey
- Died: 16 November 2000, Paris, France (heart attack), aged 43
- Buried: Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
- Origin: Kurdish father from Adıyaman province, Turkish mother
- Genre: Turkish folk and protest song, often called özgün müzik
- Instrument: bağlama (saz)
- Language: mostly Turkish; the Kurdish song Karwan was released after his death
- Known for: his protest ballads, the 1999 awards-night controversy, and dying in exile
Early life in Malatya
Ahmet Kaya was born on 28 October 1957 in Malatya, in eastern Turkey, the youngest of five children. His father was a Kurd from Adıyaman province who worked in a state textile factory; his mother was Turkish. That mixed home matters for everything that came later. Kaya grew up speaking Turkish, sang in Turkish, and sold millions of records to Turkish listeners, yet he never stopped describing himself as a Kurd.
Music came early. The instrument that shaped him was the bağlama, the long-necked saz that sits at the centre of both Turkish and Kurdish folk music in Anatolia. He played it from childhood and was performing in public before he was ten. As a young man he moved to Istanbul, where he served his military service as a musician and then scraped a living playing in other singers' bands.
Career: the voice of the gecekondu
Kaya's first album, Ağlama Bebeğim ("Don't Cry, My Baby"), came out in 1985, followed the same year by Acılara Tutunmak ("Holding On to Sorrow"). Turkey was only a few years past the 1980 military coup. Many left-wing poets were in prison or exile, and a large audience of students, workers and migrants to Istanbul's poor gecekondu neighbourhoods wanted songs that spoke to them.
Kaya gave them those songs. He set the words of socialist poets such as Nazım Hikmet and Ahmed Arif to simple, driving bağlama arrangements. His voice was rough and close to speech, more like a man talking to you across a table than a polished star. The result was a style that the Turkish music industry called özgün müzik, "original music": folk instruments, political lyrics, and melodies that anyone could sing along to.
Through the late 1980s and the 1990s he released an album almost every year, including Şafak Türküsü (1986), Yorgun Demokrat (1987), Başkaldırıyorum (1988), Sevgi Duvarı (1990), Başım Belada (1991) and Tedirgin (1993). In 1994 came Şarkılarım Dağlara ("My Songs Are for the Mountains"). In the Turkey of 1994, when the war between the army and the PKK was at its height, "the mountains" was not a neutral phrase, and many listeners heard the album as a direct comment on the conflict in the Kurdish southeast. His last studio album in his lifetime was Dosta Düşmana Karşı (1998).
Besides Nazım Hikmet and Ahmed Arif, he set poems by Attila İlhan, Can Yücel, Hasan Hüseyin Korkmazgil and Yusuf Hayaloğlu. Few Turkish singers have done as much to bring modern poetry to a mass audience. By the late 1990s he was one of the most recognisable musicians in the country.
11 February 1999: the awards night
On 11 February 1999, the Turkish Association of Magazine Journalists held its annual televised music awards in Istanbul. Kaya was there to receive the Musician of the Year award. In his speech he said that, because he was of Kurdish origin, he wanted to include a Kurdish song on his next album and make a video for it.
The reaction in the room was immediate. Parts of the audience of celebrities and journalists booed him, and some threw forks and knives towards his table. His wife, Gülten Kaya, later described how "all of those chic women and men" suddenly "turned into monsters", throwing cutlery and insulting them. Other performers on the stage answered with nationalist songs.
The following days were worse. The newspaper Hürriyet published a photograph that it claimed showed Kaya performing in front of a PKK flag, and prosecutors opened a case against him. In June 1999 he left for France. In March 2000 a Turkish court sentenced him in absentia to three years and nine months in prison for "separatist propaganda".
It is worth being precise about what he had actually asked for. He did not call for violence or make a political manifesto. He said he wanted to sing one song in the language of his father. That this was enough to end his life in Turkey says a great deal about how Kurdish music was treated in that period, a history we trace in how Kurdish music was banned.
Exile and death in Paris
Kaya spent the last months of his life in Paris, working on new material. On 16 November 2000 he died of a heart attack. He was 43. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery after a crowded funeral. When his grave was vandalised in 2021, the attack made headlines, a sign of how much he still means to people.
Several albums were released after his death, among them Hoşçakalın Gözüm (2001), Biraz da Sen Ağla (2003), Kalsın Benim Davam (2005) and Gözlerim Bin Yaşında (2006). Hoşçakalın Gözüm included Karwan ("Caravan"), the Kurdish song he had recorded. The song that caused his exile was finally released after he was gone.
Signature works
If you are new to Ahmet Kaya, three albums give a good picture of him:
- ***Ağlama Bebeğim* (1985).** The debut. Raw, direct and still unpolished, it announced a new kind of protest singer.
- ***Şarkılarım Dağlara* (1994).** His most openly political record, released at the height of the war in the southeast.
- ***Hoşçakalın Gözüm* (2001).** The posthumous album that includes Karwan, and a moving farewell.
Ahmet Kaya's best songs
These are the titles people search for most, and a good first playlist. All are sung in Turkish except Karwan.
- Kara Yazı ("Black Fate"). One of his most searched songs, a slow lament about a destiny that cannot be escaped.
- Nereden Bileceksiniz ("How Would You Know"). A song of anger and grief addressed to people who have never suffered.
- Katlime Ferman ("An Order for My Execution"). A defiant ballad from his late-1980s period.
- Şiire Gazele ("To Poetry, to the Ghazal"). A love song that shows his gentler side.
- Ağlama Bebeğim ("Don't Cry, My Baby"). The title song of his first album.
- Karwan ("Caravan"). His Kurdish song, released after his death on Hoşçakalın Gözüm.
Legacy
Ahmet Kaya's reputation grew after his death rather than fading. His albums have never stopped selling, and his songs are standard repertoire at protest marches, student gatherings and Kurdish community nights across Europe.
Turkey itself slowly changed its view of him. In 2012 the same association of magazine journalists that had hosted the 1999 ceremony gave him a special award. In 2013 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Grand Prize in Culture and Arts in the music category. For many of his fans this felt like a belated apology; for others it came far too late.
In Paris, the Ahmet Kaya Kurdish Cultural Centre was founded in 2001 on Rue d'Enghien. It offers Kurdish language, music and dance classes and has become one of the central meeting places of the Kurdish community in France. Kaya's name, in other words, became part of Kurdish life in the diaspora that he was forced to join.
The Kurdish connection
Ahmet Kaya is an unusual figure in Kurdish music. He was not a dengbêj, he did not sing in Kurmanji or Sorani for most of his career, and his style came from Turkish folk and left-wing poetry rather than from Kurdish village song. So why do Kurds claim him so strongly?
- Identity. He publicly identified as a Kurd at a time when saying so on television was risky, and he paid for it with his home and, many believe, his health.
- A shared instrument. The bağlama he played is also the saz of Kurdish musicians in Turkey. Kurdish artists such as Şivan Perwer built their own sound on the same instrument.
- Shared exile. Kaya's path, from stage to court case to Paris, repeats the story of many Kurdish musicians before him. Şivan Perwer left Turkey in 1976; others followed after the 1980 coup. Their story is told in our article on Kurdish protest music in the diaspora and in our wider look at Kurdish diaspora music.
- Popularity in Kurdistan. His songs are widely known in Bakur (Turkish Kurdistan), and the fact that a Sorani Wikipedia article about him is read every month shows his reach in the south as well.
If his songs speak to you, the themes of loss and distance run through the Kurdish songs in our longing and exile playlist.
Where to start listening
- Start with a single song: Kara Yazı. It shows his voice at its most intimate.
- Then one album, start to finish: Şarkılarım Dağlara (1994).
- Then his Kurdish song: Karwan, on Hoşçakalın Gözüm (2001). Listen knowing what it cost him.
- For context: read about other singers who carried Kurdish music through bans and exile in our guide to famous Kurdish singers.
Ahmet Kaya never got to make the Kurdish album he spoke about in 1999. But the question he asked that night, whether a man may sing in his mother's or father's tongue, is one that Kurdish music has answered many times since. We invite you to explore the Kurmanji notation in our library and the songs that singers like him fought to keep alive.