“What does your weird family name mean? What is its origin?” I have been asked throughout my life. Explanation ↓
There is a musical instrument in Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, called kobza in Ukrainian and cobză in Romanian.
Kobza is nearly identical to the lute and similar to the mandolin. The original Ukrainian and Romanian kobza has 8 strings, but in Ukraine a spin-off of kobza has evolved into a large, complex, up to 56 strings instrument approaching the harp rather than the lute. This larger form of kobza+ is called ‘bandura’ in Ukrainian, but it is still considered a kobza. Bandura’s sound is deeper and more voluminous than the original medieval kobza with 8 strings. Bandura is much harder to play (no frets, many strings). Both forms coexist in Ukraine.
A kobza player is called “kobzar” in Ukrainian and “cobzar” in Romanian (“á” is under stress in both languages).
Captain Obvious says that one of my ancestors was a kobza player.
Nice, but… this is just the beginning of the story.
In Romania and Bessarabia, cobzars performed as musicians, but in Ukraine the role of kobzars has taken on a much larger, symbolic, even existential meaning. The word ‘kobzar’ became the symbol of the Ukrainian culture. Here is why.
Kobza players, first kobzars, were itinerant (often wounded and blind) retired warriors of the Ukrainian Cossack army. It was a self-managed society based on the principle of direct democracy, ±Swiss-style. Ukrainian Cossacks were free men, with directly elected leaders, fighting day and night for freedom and independence against their powerful neighbours: the Polish Crown, the Russian Tsardom and the Crimean Tatars. Read Nikolai Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” for a panoramic, nearly epic picture of their daily lives and customs.
With a kobza in hand, kobzars moved from regiment to regiment, from one Ukrainian village to another. They composed and sang Ukrainian songs and ballads, they wrote music by drawing inspiration from the authentic Ukrainian sources — they were literally building the Ukrainian culture when no written literary tradition existed. Today we’d say they were “Kulturträger”, like the French troubadours or the German minnesingers — Ukrainian minstrels of the Pontic steppes in the Wild Fields…
Kulturträger, indeed… When in the 1830s the founder of modern Ukrainian poetry and codified language Taras Ševčenko was choosing a name for his first collection of verse in Ukrainian, he decided to name his book “Kobzar”. Ševčenko didn’t play kobza, but he considered himself a “kobzar” as a writer — a Kulturträger — the one who was spreading and developing the Ukrainian culture: not through music, but through poetry and literature.
« Go for love, you dark-browed maidens,
But not with Muscovites,
For Muscovites are strangers,
They bring you misfortune. »— Taras Ševčenko in 1840. Beginning of the poem “Kateryna”. Source: “Kobzar”, Kyiv, USSR, ‘Radjansjka Škola Editions’, 1987, p.17
The title of the book became synonymous with the author: very soon Ševčenko himself became known as ‘the Kobzar’ with a capital ‘K’. A nickname. He is often referred to as “the greatest kobzar of Ukraine” without playing this instrument. In most Ukrainian towns you will find Ševčenko’s statues of this Ukrainian poet, he is Number One for Ukraine. There exist Kobzar streets in Ukraine too.
Nowadays Ukrainian soldiers receive a compact copy of Ševčenko’s “Kobzar” when they go to the trenches fighting for their freedom and independence, as their ancestors did centuries ago.
It was a parenthesis for Ševčenko. Now back to kobzars the musicians. They remained active throughout the Ukrainian history. This “Kulturträgerheit” has become a cultural phenomenon called “kobzardom”: kobzars had their own guilds, brotherhoods, and music schools. In the Soviet times, kobzars were oppressed and persecuted because of their strong Ukrainian character and recurrent religious motifs in their texts — the Communists bashfully replaced the word ‘kobzar’ by ‘bandurist’, but Perestroika and Ukrainian independence quickly rehabilitated the kobzars.
So, everything embodied in the word “kobzar”: music + literature + culture + the Ukrainian language. This is why Kobzar is undoubtably the most symbolic Ukrainian name with the strongest association with Ukrainian identity. Its emblematic quality for Ukraine is similar to Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante or Cervantes in the respective cultures.
I personally earned nothing to receive this name, I was just born like this with no relation to the poet Ševčenko. But my ID card tells me that I carry the genes of my unknown ancestor, an ordinary Ukrainian minstrel kobzar: poet, singer, and musician.