Fazil Yuldash-ogly

Fozil Yo‘ldosh o‘g‘li was born in 1872 into a peasant family in the village of Loyqa, which today belongs to the Baxmal district of the Jizzakh region (at the time the area was part of the Bulungur district of the Samarkand region). He lost his father early, grew up an orphan and worked as a shepherd from the age of nine.

From youth he practised the dombra and the singing of terma verse. In his twenties he learned the craft of the epic singer from Yo‘ldosh shoir and, having passed a test set by his teacher, was recognised as an accomplished dostonchi at about 25–26. He took over the tradition of the Bulungur school — of Amin shoir, Chini shoir, Sultonmurod shoir and others — and enriched it with his gift for improvisation; he is regarded as the school’s greatest and last representative.

His repertoire ran to more than forty dastans, about thirty of which were written down. They include heroic epics (“Alpomish”, “Rustamkhan”, “Yusuf and Ahmad”, “The Birth of Goroghli”), romantic ones (“Shirin and Shakar”, “Zevarkhan”, “Malika Ayyor”) and popular retellings of written poems. “Alpomish” holds a special place: of the roughly forty versions recorded from Uzbek bards, his is the fullest (about 14,000 lines) and the most accomplished artistically.

He also turned to contemporary subjects, composing the dastans “The Jizzakh Uprising” about the events of 1916, “Ochildiyov” about the fight against the basmachi and “Mamatkarim Polvon”, the termas “My Days”, “To My Children” and “To Pushkin”, and, during the Second World War, termas and songs meant to raise the soldiers’ spirits. He was a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1942 and received the Order of Lenin.

The first part of “Alpomish” appeared in an abridged Russian translation in Tashkent in 1939, edited by the poet Hamid Olimjon, and in 1958 a Russian edition of the epic based on Fozil Yo‘ldosh o‘g‘li’s version was published in Moscow. He died in Bulungur on 17 March 1955 and was buried there. A memorial museum has been opened in Bulungur and a monument erected; in 2022 the 150th anniversary of his birth was marked.