Kobzars (кобзарі; kobzari). Itinerant bards who performed a repertoire of epic-historical, religious, and folk songs to the accompaniment of the multi-stringed kobza or bandura. This general term has often been applied to different types of musicians, but more accurately it refers to bandurists who completed a particular type of apprenticeship where they have mastered a specfic repertoire; these kobzars were usually blind. Quite frequently, historical court bandurists or modern bandura-playing concert performers have been refered to as kobzars in spite of the fact that their repertoire, manner of playing, and lifestyle differ very considerably from those of traditional kobzars and do not fit the parameters of conventional kobzardom. In the 15–16th centuries the courts of Polish kings and magnates occasionally employed court bandurists, such as Churylo and Tarashko. Court bandurists later also existed at the Russian courts of Peter I, Elizabeth I, and Catherine II (eg, Hryhorii Liubystok and Oleksii Rozumovsky). But these were not kobzars in the specific meaning of this term.

Most probably, itinerant kobzars first emerged in the 16th century in Left-Bank Ukraine in the Poltava region, around the towns of Myrhorod and Komyshnia. It is popularly thought that the kobzar tradition was later established at the Zaporozhian Sich and that kobzars were esteemed by the Cossacks and accompanied them on various campaigns against the Turks, Tatars, and Poles. The epic songs they performed served to raise the morale of the Cossack army in times of war, and some kobzars (eg, Prokip Skriaha, Vasyl Varchenko, and Mykhailo, ‘Sokovy’s son-in-law’) were even beheaded by the Poles for performing and inciting popular revolts. Other opinions regarding the establishment of the kobzar legacy point to church hospitals that looked after blind and crippled Cossacks as places where the kobzar tradition evolved. The kobzars developed a formal apprenticeships system focusing on a standardized course of education with exams and by-laws that reflected the values adopted in Europe by various professional guilds.

As the Hetman state declined, so did the fortunes of the kobzars, and they gradually joined the ranks of mendicants, playing and begging for alms at rural marketplaces. In the late 18th century the occupation of kobzar became the almost exclusive province of the blind and crippled, who organized kobzar brotherhoods to protect their corporate interests. In the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly from the 1870s, the kobzars, including the virtuosos Ostap Veresai and Hnat Honcharenko, were persecuted by the tsarist regime as the propagators of Ukrainophile sentiments and historical memory. (Kobzars are immortalized in the poetry and drawings of Taras Shevchenko and he titled his poetic works Kobzar.) The few hundred remaining kobzars in Poltava gubernia, Kharkiv gubernia, and Chernihiv gubernia and their artistry aroused the interest of various ethnographers, composers, and painters, including Mykola Lysenko, Oleksander Rusov, Opanas Slastion, Lesia Ukrainka, Klyment Kvitka, Mykola Sumtsov, Vasyl Horlenko, Valeriian Borzhkovsky, Oleksander Borodai, Filaret Kolessa, and Dmytro Revutsky.

At the 12th Russian Archeological Congress in Kharkiv in 1902, the kobzars Terentii Parkhomenko, Mykhailo Kravchenko, Ivan Kucherenko-Kuchuhura, P. Hashchenko, P. Drevchenko, and I. Netesa, accompanied by Hnat Khotkevych, the leading authority on kobzar artistry, performed to great acclaim, and the congress participants passed a resolution concerning the great value of the kobzars’ art. Government attitudes toward the kobzars softened, and thereafter kobzar concerts became frequent events in many Ukrainian and Russian cities. Bandura schools were established, and in 1909 Khotkevych published the first history and manual of bandura playing; with others by M. Domontovych, V. Shevchenko, and V. Ovchynnykov following in 1913–14.

In the 20th century interest in the kobzar tradition continued to grow and gradually transformed into a more academically focused discipline with sophisticated instruments and extensive repertoire taught in a more formal environment in music schools. From 1908 bandura playing was taught at the Lysenko Music and Drama School in Kyiv. In 1910–11 transcriptions undertaken by Filaret Kolessa of phonograph recordings of the kobzars traditional repertoire were published. The kobzar artistry also spread into the Kuban, where it had not existed prior to that. During the Revolution of 1917 and subsequent Ukrainian-Soviet War, 1917–21, kobzars composed and performed songs promoting the Ukrainian national cause and smuggled political literature; many paid for this with their lives. From July 1918 to 1919 the first Ukrainian banduryst ensemble existed briefly in Kyiv.

Under Soviet rule, this ensemble was reestablished in 1923 in Kyiv as the State Banduryst Kapelle of Ukraine. The Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and VUAN Cabinet of Musical Ethnography, particularly its members Klyment Kvitka, Mariia Hrinchenko, and Kateryna Hrushevska, conducted important studies of the kobzars in the 1920s. In the 1930s, with forced collectivization, the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3, and the Stalinist suppression of Ukrainian culture, the kobzars were again repressed. (Already in 1929 Hryhorii Epik published the novel Zustrich [The Meeting] depicting the persecution of the kobzars.) Communist Party directives to create a new socialist folklore and ‘Soviet’ kobzars resulted in the First Republican Conference of Kobzars and Lirnyks in April 1939, sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. The parareligious and moralistic repertoire of the kobzars was suppressed, and kobzars were restricted from performing. Some were arrested and executed. Overall, by the end of the 1930s the traditional authentic kobzardom ceased to exist.

In the late 1930s a new type of Soviet concert kobzar appeared and replaced the traditional kobzars. Bandurists such as Petro Huz, F. Kushneryk, Yehor Movchan, Pavlo Nosach, Oleksander A. Markevych, Ye. Adamtsevych, S. Avramenko, and Volodymyr Perepeliuk, were brought together to discuss ‘the first examples of Soviet dumas and heroic songs and the task of creating a Soviet epos.’ These new Soviet kobzars avoided the traditional kobzar repertoire and played on modernized instruments. Works, such as ‘Duma about the Communist Party’ and ‘Duma about Lenin,’ were composed with the institute’s workers and members of the Writers' Union of Ukraine and Union of Composers of Ukraine and performed at the conference’s closing concert. The ‘creators’ were immediately inducted into the writers’ union, and a Section of Folk Arts was formed in the union to ‘organize systematic creative and methodological assistance for kobzars and lirnyks.’ To hide the sudden disappearance of authentic kobzardom, the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and the Kyiv Philharmonic jointly set up a State Ethnographic Kobzar Ensemble in early 1941, consisting of Movchan, Nosach, Huz, Markevych, Perepeliuk, and I. Ivanchenko. During its brief existence, the ensemble performed throughout Ukraine and in Moscow until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

In postwar Soviet Ukraine a large kobzar concert was organized in Kyiv in 1969 and the Alliance of Folk Bards-Kobzars was formed under the auspices of the Music Society of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1974 the alliance was transformed into a Section of Kobzars and Bandurysts, with professional and amateur members. During the 1970s a parallel non-official movement arose that was dedicated to keeping authentic kobzar performance alive and viable; it focused on playing in a traditional manner on authentically constructed instruments. The movement was originated by Heorhii Tkachenko and was later led by Mykola Budnyk and Mykola Tovkailo. It included instrument workshops and numerous performances of traditional kobzar repertoire. A school of traditional performance practice was established by Volodymyr Kushpet. Scholarship into the authentic kobzar tradition has been led in Ukraine by Kost Cheremsky and Nazar Bozhynsky.

Kobzar artistry has been cultivated among Ukrainians in the West, thanks to the efforts of Vasyl Yemets, Hryhorii Kytasty, P. Honcharenko, V. Kachurak, Zinovii Shtokalko, Roman Levytsky, Volodymyr Lutsiv, Julian Kytasty, Victor Mishalow, and other masters.

On 5 December 2024 the kobzar tradition was recognized by UNESCO at the 19th session of its International Committee held in Paraguay as a world non-material cultural legacy of humanity and a protected tradition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Speranskii, M. Iuzhnorusskaia pesnia i sovremennye ee nositeli (po povodu bandurista T.M. Parkhomenko) (Kyiv 1904)
Iemets', V. Kobza ta kobzari (Berlin 1922)
Kyrdan, B.; Omel'chenko, A. Narodni spivtsi-muzykanty na Ukraïni (Kyiv 1980)
Lavrov, F. Kobzari: Narysy z istoriï kobzarstva Ukraïny (Kyiv 1980)
Shtokalko, Zinovii. Kobzars'kii pidruchnyk (Edmonton–Kyiv 1992)
Noll, V. ‘Moral'nyi avtorytet ta suspil'na rol' slipykh bardiv v Ukraïni,’ Rodovid, 6 (1993)
Kononenko, N. Ukrainian Minstrels ... and the blind shall sing (Armonk, NY 1998)

Victor Mishalow, Mykola Mushynka

[This article was updated in 2026.]