Bosnian Sevdalinka: Sound of a soul that endures | Opinion

From last year until now,

because Biba suffers for love.

Biba of the Celebic family is in pain. She suffers, yet tells no one.

"Daughter Biba, my flower,

tell your mother - what hurts you, my soul?"

"My heart aches and so does my head,

for my beloved one speaks with another."

"What beloved one? May the waters take him,

for because of him you fell ill so young."

"Dear mother, do not curse him,

He promised he would marry me."

This is the beginning of the famous Bosnian sevdalinka "Cudna jada od Mostara grada," a story of love, longing and quiet suffering, in which a mother tries to reach her daughter through the weight of heartbreak.

Some songs tell a story, and then some songs hold a state of being. That is the essence of traditional urban folk songs, sevdalinka. Its subject is often a feeling that never quite resolves.

Himzo Polovina, a psychiatrist by training and a sevdah interpreter by calling, was one of the most refined custodians of Bosnia-Herzegovina's musical soul. He did not simply perform sevdalinka, he read it, almost like a text. He slowed it down, allowed silence to speak and turned each line into an inner monologue.

His repertoire carried that same quiet intensity: "Kraj tanana sadrvana," "Sejdefu majka budaee" and "Kad ja podoh na Bembasu."

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, we often say that sevdalinka is a state of the soul. Not just a genre. Not merely a tradition. It is a way of feeling that exists somewhere between longing and tenderness, between memory and presence. In many ways, it captures our relationship with life, love and loss perfectly.

For centuries, these songs were not learned in institutions but inherited. Mothers sang them to daughters. Young men whispered them across courtyards. They lived in teferics - open-air gatherings where life unfolded slowly - and in the intimacy of homes, carried by voice rather than notation. Much like the Ottoman makam, where melody is never fixed but shaped through feeling, sevdalinka breathes through nuance, ornament and pause. It is as much about what is left unsaid as what is sung.

Today, sevdalinka is recognized as part of the world's intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO. But long before any formal recognition, it survived through people through repetition and love.

Anyone familiar with the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina knows that survival itself has often been the defining condition. We have been through war, aggression and genocide.

During the 1990s, more than 2 million people were displaced, and over 100,000 were killed. Entire lives were uprooted. Among those who fled was the author of this text. Like many others, we boarded what felt like the last trains out of Sarajevo, carrying little more than what we wore, fragments of faith, traces of tradition and the quiet hope of survival.

Slovenia, a small country with a large heart, became one of those unexpected shelters for tens of thousands of Bosnians who found refuge during the war. Some returned to Bosnia-Herzegovina after it ended. Others stayed, building new lives, sometimes out of choice, often out of necessity and sometimes simply because the past was too heavy to return to.

Among those who grew up in that space between memory and reinvention are the members of the vocal group DeDer: Nejla Dragonic, Azra Alihodzic, and Taida Tabakovic. They belong to the second and third generations shaped by displacement. They did not inherit sevdalinka directly. They chose it.

Their work is not a nostalgic imitation. It is reconstruction.

Through projects and collaboration with ethnomusicologists, they have returned to lesser-known rural songs, learning techniques that had nearly disappeared. In doing so, they are not only preserving sevdah, but they are also relearning it, reclaiming a sound that predates modern arrangements and urban reinterpretations.

Recently, they brought that part of their soul to Ankara, in an event organized by the embassies of Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was more than a performance. It was a quiet statement about what it means to carry a culture across borders and to let it evolve without losing its essence.

In a time when new waves of displacement shape lives in places like Palestine and Lebanon, the question of what we carry with us becomes urgent again. Tradition, when it survives, does not shrink. It expands. It learns new languages, new geographies and new audiences.

Because when you belong to more than one place, something remarkable happens: You do not divide your soul, you deepen it. You learn to love two countries, but you carry one way of loving.

My own favorite sevdalinka is "Razbolje se cimsir list."

The boxwood leaf has fallen ill

beneath the window of fair Magbula,

it has withered, turning yellow from sorrow.

"Dark-eyed Magbula,

to my very roots I am drenched

in tears of a great sevdah sorrow.

Weep no more, girl,

any young man could be yours -

weep no more, but water me instead."

A tear comes almost instantly, not from sadness, but from something more elusive.

A tender remembrance. Perhaps for times that have passed, but also for the quiet hope of something better ahead.

In that sense, the DeDer girls are not only preserving the past. They are shaping the future. And it matters that a Turkish audience could hear them. Because in that shared space between sevdah and makam, between memory and movement, something deeply human emerges. A feeling that crosses borders without translation, and maybe that is the most important part.

We Bosnians have carried our traditions for centuries, through wars, through displacement and even through genocide. What has been built over generations does not simply disappear. You can destroy cities. You can force people to leave. You can try to erase history. But you cannot erase what lives in people. You cannot erase a soul.