Nesimi Çimen

Nesimi Çimen — Biography

Nesimi Çimen was born in 1931 in the Saimbeyli district of Adana; his family settled in Sarız, Kayseri, where he worked as a tenant farmer for a village landowner and began playing the saz at twelve. After falling in love with the landowner's daughter Dilber, the couple eloped to the village of Sevdili near Kahramanmaraş; he later moved to Istanbul, where the writer Yaşar Kemal helped him get a factory job, only for him to be dismissed after leading a strike, at which point he turned to being a wandering minstrel to support his family. In 1967, after performing in a Pir Sultan Abdal play in Tunceli, he was detained by police and released with half his moustache plucked out.

At his gecekondu home in Zeytinburnu he hosted figures such as Yaşar Kemal, Atıf Yılmaz, İlhan Selçuk and Yılmaz Güney; he collected folk songs for radio archives and became known for singing to the cura rather than the bağlama. On 2 July 1993, while attending the Pir Sultan Abdal festival in Sivas with his wife Makbule Çimen, he died when the Madımak Hotel was set alight; his wife survived, severely injured. His son, dancer-musician Mazlum Çimen, carries on his music, his grandson Saki Çimen is a pianist, and Makbule Çimen died in 2024.