HANNAH BERGER
As a child there was a shorter period in my life when my family hosted Arabian and Vietnamese students whom I spent much time with we presented each other with the joy of singing, talking and dining together. Those wonderful songs from Yemen sung by our friends in the afternoons and evenings have still been in my heart. In my childhood I had been studying piano for 7 years. Much later I started my journey towards the East, exactly to Turkey, which became a journey that really determined my future life.
"I arrived home". During my journeys I also got acquainted with the language and that many-sided music culture that Turkey has, mainly the Turkish folk music.
We established the Arasinda Orchestra in Budapest in 1996 which played Turkish folk music and I had been its singer and front woman for 10 years. We published two records called Aşkın şarabı (The Wine of Love) and Ne olursan ol (Whoever you are). While I was studying singing from the Iraqi composer and musician Moofed Alnasih playing the oud and violin, I did my best to travel to Turkey every year, to visit the country, to sing and learn.
In 2006 the doors to the Balkans also opened for me due to an interesting encounter. I am the singer and the founder of the Dilber Orchestra who plays South-Slavonic, mainly Bosnian, Serbian and Balkan Roma folk music beyond the Turkish folk music. There is a musical bridge between these counties and cultures which connects them closely to each other. The word of Persian origin called Dilber also refers to this; this word as a musical stream came from Persia / Dilber: bringing love/ through Turkey / Dilber: wonderful woman/ up to the Balkans /Dilber: lover, darling/ where it stopped.
Anatolia and Balkans have an extremely colourful and wonderful world of music with a lot of common characters but also exciting differences. Through music you can go on a special journey as if you were travelling with a caravan stopping sometimes at a pub, a khan; where the musical instruments and a song can be heard, ranging from the wonderful but hard melodies of East Turkey to the sweet music of the Black Sea region. Then the mysterious world of Bosnia starts glinting or a Roma song by the fire at night....
As the famous Turkish song says: "Uzun ince bir yoldayim, gidiyorum gündüz gece... "I am walking on a long and narrow road, I keep going day and night..."/ I am on the go.
