Kara Jel Tünü
Kara jel tünü (Iradi, "night of the black wind") is an all-night healing rite of the Iradi highlands for a person said to be kara jel tiyüü, "struck by the black wind": a sickness of fits, melancholy, wasting or sleeplessness attributed to a wind sent by Morkhan or carried from the dead.[1]
Rite
The rite is held in the patient's yurt or house. A singer-healer, the jelchi, who may be a man or a woman, leads musicians on the kyl-kyak, the frame drum (dobulbas) and sometimes the sybyzgy flute. They play the named melodies of the wind (jel küüsü) one after another while the patient sits under a white cloth, until the patient begins to sway to the one "the wind answers to". That melody is played faster and faster until the patient rises, dances and falls, and the wind is said to have left.[1]
Practice and the Church
The rite is held in highland villages, in the Karatau, where the ak bakshy of the Eski El lead it (see Autonomous Tribal Regions), and more quietly in Jogorku and on the outskirts of Talas. The Syro-Iradi Catholic Church has forbidden it since Kokand times, imposing penance and withholding communion, but many families do both, attending the Liturgy in the morning and the kara jel at night.[2] Mor-Folk and Mor-Wave musicians have borrowed its melodies, and the Mor-Wave group Kara Jel took its name from it.
References
- ^ Department of Ethnography, Talas State University (2009). Healers of the High Valleys. Talas: Talas State University Press.
- ^ Talas State University Press (2023). Sacred Toponymy and Ecclesiastical Monasteries of Iyık Janyl, pp. 112–119.