Thirteen hours. No book.
One storyteller, one epic, one voice. Scribes needed years to write down what he carries in his head, and still the next performance will be new.
Watch the film · 45 sUp to thirteen hours.
No book.
“One storyteller. One epic. Up to thirteen hours — no book.”From the film
Picture a man sitting on a felt rug with nothing in his hands. No script on a stand, no instrument across his knees, no prompter in the wings. He opens his mouth, and the story of Manas, his son Semetey and his grandson Seytek begins to come out of it. If he tells the whole trilogy without stopping, it can run for up to thirteen hours.
That number comes from UNESCO, which in 2013 put the Kyrgyz epic trilogy on its list of the intangible heritage of humanity. Read the entry closely and you notice what it protects. Not a book, not a manuscript, not a famous edition: the thing on the list is the living habit of telling. The epic is kept the way a song is kept, by people who sing it.
Our film draws that habit as lines of a voice. Every phrase leaves a trace, the trace settles on the one before it, and the stack slowly turns into a mountain ridge. This page follows the same lines, one chapter at a time.
His only instrument
is his voice.
In Kyrgyz the storyteller is a manaschi, a singer of Manas. Those who carry the later parts are called semeteychi and seytekchi. UNESCO counts both women and men among them, and every age, from children learning their first passages to old masters.
Other Kyrgyz singers play the komuz, the three-string lute. The manaschi does not. The epic is recited unaccompanied, in a chant built on short lines of about seven syllables, with the same sound often opening several words in a row. Everything else is the body: the hands open and sweep, the shoulders rock with the rhythm of a galloping horse, the face tightens with the fight being described.
That is why the film never puts a lute in his hands. His hands are free because they are part of the telling.
Years of writing
for one singer.
“Scribes took years to write down one singer’s version: half a million lines.”From the film
Paper came late to the Manas. Shokan Valikhanov wrote down one episode in 1856; Wilhelm Radloff recorded Kyrgyz singers in 1862 and 1869. In the twentieth century the work became enormous. The version of Sagymbay Orozbakov was taken down over four years, from June 1922 to August 1926, and printed in full only in 2010, in a volume of 1,840 pages.
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Then came Sayakbay Karalaev, who sang all three parts of the trilogy. Writing him down took from 1936 to 1952. The usual Kyrgyz figure for his version is 500,553 lines. It was recorded over sixteen years, in many sessions. Nobody sang half a million lines in one go, and nobody claims so.
Numbers that big stop meaning anything, so try them as lines of ink. Below, one drawn line stands for ten thousand lines of verse.
Line counts flatter the Manas: a Homeric line is about twice as long as a Kyrgyz one. The Orozbakov figure is rounded.
Guinness lists the Manas as the longest poem ever published. Note the word: published. Counted in words rather than lines, the Mahabharata and the Tibetan Gesar are bigger. What makes the Kyrgyz record strange is not its length on the shelf. It is that every line of it was once in somebody’s voice.
The voice climbs,
almost into a trance.
Listen long enough and you hear the music move. Each singer has a handful of short melodic motifs of his own, and over a long performance the register slowly rises. In the film this is the moment the main peak shoots up above the ridge. UNESCO says that during a recital the teller enters a near-trance state, using rhythm, tone and gesture to bring back the world of the epic.
Karalaev was famous for it. Writing for National Geographic in 2017, Paul Salopek recalled how he wept, paused, fell silent and broke into a roar, and how his listeners shook.
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Not word for word.
Never the same twice.
Here is the part most retellings get wrong. A manaschi does not recite a memorised text. In 1885 Radloff wrote that every skilled singer improvises according to the inspiration of the moment, so he cannot sing a song twice in exactly the same way. Radloff did not mean the singer invents everything anew. He compared him with an improviser at the piano, who joins runs, transitions and motifs he already knows into something new.
That remark travelled far. It influenced Milman Parry, whose work on how Homer’s poems could have been composed aloud grew, with Albert Lord, into the theory of oral formulas. And it can still be tested. In 2017 researchers at the American University of Central Asia recorded the same passage, the birth of Manas, by the same manaschi, Talantaaly Bakchiev, on three occasions and compared the three. Same story, same formulas, three different songs.
The same five motifs, in a new order and a new length each time. A drawing of Radloff’s idea, not a transcription.
A young manaschi told Salopek that he never simply starts: he picks his passages by his mood that day. Think about what that means for the half a million lines. They are one evening of one singer, frozen on paper. The epic itself is the thing that keeps moving.
An evening in a yurt,
under the ridge.
At the end of the film the lines of voice turn into real mountains, and a yurt appears below them. That is the honest way to hear a manaschi as a visitor: not at a ticket office, but at an evening a guide has arranged. Tour operators offer it most often in yurt camps of the Chon-Kemin valley, sometimes near Karakol or at Song-Köl.
You will not hear thirteen hours. You will hear a passage, chosen for the night, by someone who learned it from a teacher and will tell it differently next time. Festivals are the other door: the Festival of World Epics in Bishkek gave its eighth edition, in 2025, to Karalaev’s 130th anniversary.
Ask for an evening. Then listen.
“A guide can arrange an evening with one, in a yurt in Chon-Kemin valley.”From the film
There is no timetable for the Manas. We found no place in Kyrgyzstan where a manaschi performs for visitors on fixed days. What tour operators do offer is an arranged meeting: an evening with a storyteller in a yurt camp, most often in the Chon-Kemin valley, a long green valley between two ranges in Chüy Region. Ask for it when you plan the trip, not on the day.
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One voice. No book.
And a version never sung before.
If you hear a manaschi one evening, you hear a song that did not exist that morning and will not come back in the same words.
Watch the 45-second filmNo Book — the short film, drawn as lines of a voice that stack up into a mountain ridge. The lines are a picture of the singing, not a recording of it.
Want to see it for yourself?
Routes, places and the best months to go — everything for planning a trip to Kyrgyzstan.
Sources
- UNESCO, element 00876 — Kyrgyz epic trilogy: Manas, Semetey, Seytek (2013): tellers of all ages, near-trance, up to thirteen hours.
- W. Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der nördlichen türkischen Stämme, vol. V, 1885, p. xvi — improvisation and the comparison with a piano improviser.
- J. Plumtree, ‘A Kyrgyz Singer of Tales’, AUCA — three performances of one passage by Talantaaly Bakchiev, 2017; Radloff and Parry.
- J. Sipos, Kyrgyz epic art — unaccompanied recitation, seven-syllable lines, motifs, rising register.
- P. Salopek, Out of Eden Walk, National Geographic, 2017 — 500,553 lines; Karalaev’s range.
- 24.kg, 26 March 2010 — the complete Orozbakov version, recorded June 1922 to August 1926.
- S. Jacquesson, CESS 2022 — on editorial changes to the Orozbakov text.
- Guinness World Records, 67403 — longest poem ever published.
- K. Reichl, The Oral Epic: From Performance to Interpretation, Routledge — performance and variation in Turkic oral epic.
- A. T. Hatto (ed.), The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy-Khan, 1977, and The Manas of Wilhelm Radloff, 1990 — the nineteenth-century records.
- Odyssey — 12,109 lines, for scale only.
- Chong-Kemin — the river and valley in Kemin District, Chüy Region.
- 24.kg — the eighth Festival of World Epics, Bishkek, 2025.
Pictures
- A manaschi performing in Karakol — SiGarb, July 2002, public domain (released by the photographer). Shown at its original size.
- Sagymbay Orozbakov with Ybyray Toychinov, 1925 — unknown photographer, public domain. Resized.
- Ybyraiym Abdyrakhmanov, Togolok Moldo and Sayakbay Karalaev, 1930s — unknown photographer, public domain.
- Sayakbay Karalaev and Chingiz Aitmatov, 1968 — from the encyclopaedia Kirgizskaya SSR, unknown photographer, public domain.
- A yurt in the Chon-Kemin valley — Hux, 2 August 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0. Resized.
- Misty morning in Chon-Kemin — Ceyhun Kavakci, 4 July 2014, CC BY-SA 2.0. Resized.
- Film frames and the cover — Kyrgyz Seasons, from the short film No Book. The lines of voice on this page are drawn in code in the style of the film.