Crimean Tatar Music

Crimean Tatar Music is the traditional music of the Crimean Tatars, the Turkic people indigenous to the Crimean Peninsula. Its core genres are the slow, melismatic uzun hava song, fast dance tunes played for weddings and the ağır hava and qaytarma dances, performed on kemane fiddle, davul and zurna, kaval, santur and baglama. Shaped by Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asian contact and by the trauma of the 1944 deportation, the repertoire carries the memory of exile and return at the centre of Crimean Tatar identity.