Manas and the Manaschi

The Manas is the reason Kyrgyz appears in an atlas of religion. It is an oral epic of enormous length, running in the fullest recorded versions to hundreds of thousands of lines, and it is performed by manaschi, specialists who typically describe their calling as arriving in a dream in which Manas or one of his companions instructs them to recite. That dream is not a literary convention; it functions as an initiation, and a manaschi who has not had one is understood to be reciting rather than transmitting.

The epic follows Manas, his son Semetey and his grandson Seytek, and it carries a layer of belief older than the Islam that the Kyrgyz have professed for centuries: the sky, the spirits of ancestors, the horse, and the protective powers attached to particular places all operate in it alongside Muslim vocabulary. Recitation is not a fixed text. A manaschi composes within a formulaic tradition, so no two performances are the same and the printed editions represent particular singers rather than the epic in itself. Kyrgyz national life since independence has made the Manas a public and political possession as well as a religious one, with a state prize, a monumental complex and a mausoleum traditionally identified as that of Manas himself in Talas.