Yosmam

Song Stories · Legends of Crimean Tatar Folk Songs · Research by Arsen Bekirov

What is sung when Yosmam is sung

There are words that cannot be translated with a single term. "Yosma" is one of them. In Turkic languages, it does not simply mean "beauty": it is a woman whose beauty carries a hint of playfulness, lightness, a certain charm — the kind you cannot help but turn around to look at again. "Yosmam," with its possessive ending, means "my yosma," "my darling." The very title holds the intonation of the entire song: not a formal "fair maiden," but a warm, living address to the beloved.

This is precisely why Yosmam has survived a century without growing old. It is still sung today — from a cappella renditions to pop arrangements and recordings by world-class artists: Aliye Yakubova, Jamala (on the album QIRIM, 2023), Elvina Yuldasheva, Asiye Saale, and the Kaitarma ensemble under Fevzi Aliyev's direction. A song sung by so many different voices across generations is never just one song — it is an entire family of its variants. This is what we will explore.

Where it comes from

Folk tradition traces Yosmam to southwestern Crimea — the region of Ak-yar (as the Crimean Tatars call Sebastopol: aq meaning "white," yar meaning "cliff above the sea"). This is a land of sailors and garrisons, a city swept through by the Crimean War — a place where parting was not a poetic convention, but daily life: men left — for service, for the sea, for war — and women waited.

The song's subject is exactly this. A young man, departing from his beloved, asks her not to shed tears in separation and to believe that he will return. In the song's imagery — the kemenche singing of longing, snow covering the valleys, love as a sweet wound, a promise of fidelity. This is a song of farewell in which tenderness is stronger than grief: not "goodbye," but "wait for me."

A living song has no single "correct" text

While working on Yosmam for the TV project Khit Ikyaesi, I discovered that it has no single canonical text. And this is not a gap in the recordings — it is the very nature of the song itself.

Folk songs live differently from authored ones. An authored song has a point of origin: a manuscript, a first performance, a fixed text. A folk song has no such anchor. It is passed from mouth to mouth, and each singer, each village, each generation fits its own words under the familiar melody — sometimes a line changes, sometimes an entire verse from another song steps in under the old tune. Folklorists call such verses "floating" (wandering): they are not tied to one song but move freely from one to another, held together by a common meter and a common feeling.

In various performances and recordings of Yosmam, I counted nine such floating verses. That is a lot. It means the song was genuinely popular — sung so often and in so many places that it had time to accumulate variants, like an old tree growing rings.

Two lives of one melody

The most striking finding from comparing variants: Yosmam exists in two distinct performance traditions, and these are not simply two sets of words — they are two different purposes for the song.

The lyrical, wedding line. Here Yosmam is what it appears to be at first glance: a love song, a confession. In the texts of this line, we find the recognizable imagery of Crimean Tatar love lyrics: a promise of fidelity, love as a sweet wound, the call of the kemenche. This kind of Yosmam naturally belongs at a wedding — in a circle where song brings joy.

The military-verse line. Here the same melody carries text of an entirely different character — strophic, "march-like." And if we remember where the song comes from — garrison Ak-yar, where farewells to departing soldiers were part of life — this second line ceases to surprise. The theme of "don't cry, I will return" is, after all, the words of a soldier leaving. Wedding tenderness and a soldier's verse turn out not to be a contradiction, but two banks of the same river.

That one melody serves both a wedding and a military farewell is not a "corruption" of the song. On the contrary: this is how its rootedness manifests. The people did not merely sing Yosmam — they claimed it, fitting it to the needs of the moment. A melody that can be filled with such different words, and in both cases it feels like "one's own" — that is a melody that has grown into the language itself.

Listen: one song, different voices

The best way to feel how a folk song lives is to hear it in different performances. Compare for yourself:

Two performances — and in each the song is slightly different: tempo, ornamentation, the order of verses. This is precisely the variability discussed above — not in words, but by ear.

Where to find Yosmam

This work draws on the written tradition of collecting Crimean Tatar folklore — the very tradition that saved hundreds of songs during the years when the culture itself was under threat.

• Asan Refatov's collection (1932) — one of the earliest attempts at musical notation of Crimean Tatar folk songs, made before the deportation — an invaluable snapshot of how these songs sounded in living practice at the beginning of the twentieth century.
• Karikov's anthology — a contemporary compendium in which the tradition finds its continuation.
• And more broadly, the entire lineage of collectors led by Yaya Sherfedinov, whose compendium Zvuchit Kaitarma (published in 1978, in exile; approximately 350 folk songs) remains to this day the essential reference for anyone working with this music.

The research continues: I have sent inquiries to the Russian National Museum of Music (Fund 134 — the Konchevsky collection of wax cylinders, 1924) and to the I. Gasprinsky Library. If early recordings of Yosmam are found in these collections, the song's history will gain yet another chapter — and I will tell it here.