ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Forty-four years have passed since the legendary Kurdish singer Hasan Zirak suddenly died of liver cancer at the age 51 in the Iranian Kurdish city of Saqiz. When Zirak died, on June 26 1972, he was at the peak of his music career, singing prolifically for most of the 1960s. He was called ‘Zirak’, which means ‘talented’ in Kurdish, for his genuine transformation of Kurdish folklore hymns to modern studio songs played in virtually every home across the Middle Easts’ Kurdish regions. Singing in South Kurmanci dialect Hasan Zirak was as popular in remote northern Kurdish villages in Syria and Turkey’s Kurdistan as he was a household name in easternmost part of Khorasan province in Iran – where a surviving Kurdish society listened to his songs as a way of adhering to their lost heritage. Despite being largely illiterate Zirak was able to compose some 1,500 songs often in radio studios in Baghdad, Tehran and Kermanshah. When he was expelled from Iraq after the July Revolution of 1958, Zirak lived a vagabond’s life between Kermanshah, the Kurdistan Region and the Kurdish city of Saqiz in Iran – where he finally was hospitalized in late 1971 and died of cancer a year later. Hasan Zirak is buried in his beloved hometown of Bokan in Iranian Kurdistan.
