“I used to live in a forest, but the axe cut me down with no mercy. While I was living, I kept my silence, but how beautifully I sing now that I am dead,” goes a poem in Turkish, dedicated to the traditional stringed musical instrument called saz. Jafer Mahmud from the Rhodope village of Tsurkvitsa, in the region of Kurdjali, South Central Bulgaria is a master-craftsman who knows how to make wood sing. His father used to play the kaval (shepherd’s flute) but the first time Jafer heard and touched the saz when he was still a little boy was enough to keep him enthralled for life. Asked how long he has been making sazes, Jafer answers: “Since I was 12, and I have been making them for 58 years now with much love and devotion.”

Before 1989, when in Kurdjali, Momchilgrad, Razgrad, Shoumen and Haskovo Turkish music theatres were very active, the saz master-craftsman couldn’t keep up with the torrent of commissions and only worked with musicians from Bulgaria. Because he was such a good singer and played the saz and other string instrumentsso well, he was invited to work for the Kurdjali popular music theatre but refused – he simply didn’t have the heart to replace the village for a big town. But by 1990 – the beginning of democratic changes in Bulgaria – things were looking very different. Commissions started coming in from all corners of the world and Jafer was selling sazes in Turkey, Greece, France and Germany. Asked which tree makes the best sazes, the master-craftsman says they can be made out of all kinds of wood: walnut, mulberry, cherry, beech, sycamore, acacia. But that it is the walnut-tree that will give the gentlest, most beautiful sound. As long the wood is dry. The easiest to work is the cherry-tree wood, but it does not “sing from the heart” as the walnut-tree wood does. People say that “the tree bends while it is young” but for Jafer the older the tree, the better the saz it is used to make.

Jafer Mahmud cannot say how many sazes, rebecs or pandores he has made. He sells them or gives them away to culture community clubs, schools or to friends. Besides making stringed instruments, he also composes songs – he has written lyrics about the Rhodope mountain, about his village, about the life he is leading. What he regrets most is that none of his children or grandchildren has shown an interest in his trade. His son and his daughter live in Jebel nearby, and after the loss of his beloved wife, he himself lives alone in the village and continues to make sazes whose voices, sad or cheerful as the case may be, spread his fame far and wide.

English version: Milena Daynova