Singing the Kyrgyz Manas: Saparbek Kasmambetov s recitations of epic poetry

Today, the Kyrgyz Manas is one of the most celebrated epic heroic poems in the world. At the turn of the new millennium it was appointed a UNESCO Masterpiece in the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity , signalling its global significance. It sits alongside Homer s Iliad and Odyssey, or the South Asian Māhābhārata and Rāmāyana, although politics and language have during the twentieth century conspired against allowing it to become as well known: while the Manas has long been considered important by European and American scholars researching epics, the difficulty of access to Kyrgyz lands during the Soviet period meant that it featured only marginally in the classic works of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. During the twentieth century, Soviet scholarship celebrated its length, and the compilations of texts from two great bards, Sagimbay Orozbaqov (1867-1930) and Sayaqbay Qaralaev (1894-1971), were held up in triumph: Sagimbay s Manas, stretching to 180,000 verse lines, was measured as four times larger than the Persian Shahname and some forty times longer than the Iliad; Sayaqbay s, at 500,533 verse lines, was twenty times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, and two-and-a-half times the length of the Māhābhārata.