Turkmenistan · Musical Instrument Making
Дутар (Dutar)
The making of the dutar — a long-necked, two-stringed, pear-bodied lute considered the defining instrument of Turkmen musical culture, inscribed by UNESCO in December 2021 (as 'Dutar making craftsmanship and traditional music performing art combined with singing') on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This record closes a complete craft-family gap in the archive's existing 12-record Turkmenistan collection, which spans carpet weaving, dyeing, silver jewelry, silk weaving, felt, embroidery, hat-making, leatherwork, wood carving, and stone-setting but documents no musical instrument. The dutar's resonating body and thin soundboard are both carved from a single, carefully selected block of mulberry wood — practitioners hold that wood from a mulberry tree at least fifty years old produces markedly superior tone, likening the tree's aging process to a person growing wiser with age — while the neck is fashioned from dried apricot-tree trunk. The instrument's cultural centrality is carried in a popular Turkmen story: a documented folk narrative holds that master dutar player Shukur Bagshi's extraordinary performance once helped avert an impending battle between Turkmen forces and a neighboring people, a national legend explicitly cited in contemporary Turkmen government cultural writing on the instrument.
Risk level: Vulnerable · UNESCO Representative List (2021) — Dutar making and performing art
The hand-weaving of düýpli gyňaç — a large, triangular silk headscarf woven exclusively by the Teke people of Turkmenistan and worn at the pivotal moment of the Turkmen wedding ceremony when a bride's maiden headdress is formally replaced…
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