Ayşe Şan

Ayşe Şan — Biography

Ayşe Şan (Eyşe Şan) was born in 1938 in Diyarbakır into a family of dengbêj singers and grew into one of the most influential voices in Kurdish music. She began performing at local gatherings in 1958, first recording Turkish-language songs for a radio station in Gaziantep before moving to Istanbul in 1960, where she cut her first Kurdish-language album and quickly built a wide following.

Facing pressure over performing in Kurdish, she relocated to Germany in the 1970s; there she lost her eighteen-month-old daughter Şahnaz, an experience she channeled into the song Qederê, while her later composition Xerîbim Dayê, written after her mother's death, became one of her signature pieces. In 1979 she traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan and performed alongside leading regional artists, and from the 1980s she lived in İzmir, working for a time at a local post office. She died of cancer on December 18, 1996, and is remembered as the "Queen without a Crown"; in 2025, in keeping with her final wish, her remains were brought back to her native Diyarbakır for reburial.