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Halay is the national dance of Turkey and refers to a broad category for all circular and line dances performed throughout the country. Today, it is danced by Turkish people, Kurds, and Greek people, among others. Halay and similar dances are parts of multiple ancient folk dance traditions and cultures throughout the Middle East and nearby regions.
These dances are commonly performed at weddings and festive gatherings, traditionally accompanied by the zurna and davul, or sometimes by the singing of the dancers themselves. In recent years, electronic instruments have increasingly been used in place of traditional musical instruments. Halay dancers typically form a circle or a line, holding each other by the fingers, hands, or shoulders. The first and last dancers may also hold a handkerchief known as a mendil. These dances usually begin slowly and gradually speed up in tempo, and their name, style, and musical characteristics vary from one town or village to another.
Over time, the name of the dance became widely recognized among other communities in Cappadocia, who used it to denote a broader category of circular or line folk dances. Variants subsequently spread across the provinces of Sivas Province, Çorum, Kayseri Province, and other parts of northern Cappadocia and regions of Turkey, each developing distinct local features while preserving the fundamental structure and rhythm of the original dance.
The historical documentation of halay dates back to the early 20th century. The earliest known written definition of the word halay appears in the 1932 ethnographic compilation Anadilden Derlemeler by Hamit Zübeyir Koşay and İshak Işıtman, where halay is defined as a hand-held line dance from Central Anatolia, accompanied by the zurna and davul. However, an earlier reference to the dance itself, explicitly identified as halay, is found in the 1928 edition of Dârülelhan Külliyatı: Anadolu Halk Şarkıları, which includes a record of the folk dance Çenber (also spelled Çember or Çemberim) from the Sivas Province, listed under this designation.
An alternate etyomology has been proposed by Sevan Nişanyan in his Etymological Dictionary of Contemporary Turkish suggesting that halay originates from the Kurdish language (Kurmanji) word hilayi, meaning "standing up" or "playing", which derives from the verb , meaning "to play", "to jump", or "to lift"
However, on 24 July 2022, Nişanyan put doubt on this revealing that he doesn't know the origin of the word.
Although commonly known by its Turkish name halay, this category of folk dance is also referred to by different names among neighboring ethnic groups: govend or dîlan in Kurdish, ḥiggā (ܚܓܐ) in Syriac language, yallı in Azerbaijani, šurǰpar (Շուրջպար) in Armenian, and halaï (χαλάι) in Greek.
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