Stand at a wedding in Trabzon and you hear it before you see it: a small three-string fiddle, held upright on the knee, bowing fast, driving a whole line of dancers who lock arms and shimmer their shoulders. That instrument is the kemençe, and along the eastern Black Sea coast it is the sound of the whole party. When people search for “Black Sea kemençe” they mean this one, the Karadeniz kemençe, an elongated boat-shaped fiddle you play standing up or sitting down, tilted out in front of you. In our shop we sell it, we set it up, and we get asked about it a lot. So let me walk you through what it actually is.
What a kemençe is, and the name confusion to clear up first
Here is the thing that trips up almost every beginner, and honestly a lot of blogs get it wrong too. The word “kemençe” names two completely different instruments.
The first is our subject: the Karadeniz kemençe, the Black Sea kemençe. Long, narrow, boat or bottle shaped, three strings, played upright. It comes from the eastern Black Sea coast and it descends from the old Pontic lyra of the Byzantine world. This is the folk fiddle that leads the dancing.
The second is the classical Ottoman kemençe, called the armudî kemençe. “Armudî” means pear, and that says it all, it has a rounded pear-shaped body. It is used in Ottoman art music, the refined fasıl repertoire, it has gut strings, and the player stops the strings with the sides of the fingernails. Different shape, different music, different technique. Same name.
So the quick way to tell them apart: if it is pear-shaped and the player is touching the strings with fingernails, that is the classical kemençe, not ours. If it is long and boat-shaped and played with the finger pads out on a dance floor, that is the Black Sea one. Here is a simple table so it stays clear.
Most people who write to us want the first one. That is the one we build and sell, so that is the one I will keep talking about.
How it is built: one block of wood, no fingerboard
A Black Sea kemençe is carved. Not glued up from bent staves like a violin body, but hollowed out of a single block of wood, the body, the neck and the pegbox all one piece. The Turkish word for this is oyma, carved. The maker picks a good block, usually plum, mulberry, juniper or walnut, and cuts the shape out of it. Plum is the wood a lot of old makers swear by. Ours is mulberry, which carves clean and gives a warm, present tone.
On top goes a separate soundboard, a thin sheet of spruce or fir, slightly arched, sitting over the hollow body. Two small soundholes. A low bridge. The neck flows straight into the body with no real break, and that long unbroken line is where the boat or bottle look comes from.
If you like the old folk names, the players have them for everything. The bridge gets nicknamed “the donkey,” eşek, because it carries the load. The three strings each have a name too, kapan, sağır (“deaf”), and zil (“cymbal”). You do not need any of that to play. It is just nice to know your instrument has been lived with long enough to earn nicknames.
The three strings and the tuning
Three strings, and they are tuned in perfect fourths. That is the constant across all Black Sea kemençes, the intervals are fourths.
Our standard 55 cm instrument tunes E-A-D, low to high, which in the Turkish note names is Mi-La-Re. That is the practical tuning I would tell you to start on. Now, if you go read Wikipedia or some other sources you will often see B-E-A quoted instead. Both are real, and here is the part competitors never explain: the kemençe comes in several lengths, and each length is pitched to its own tuning. There is no single “correct” tuning. A shorter body sits higher, a longer one sits lower. The 55 cm is the most common size, and that is the one we stock, so E-A-D is the number that matters for the instrument you would actually get from us.
The strings themselves used to be silk. Around 1920 players switched over to metal, steel strings, and that is what everyone uses today. A small dateable detail, but it tells you the modern bright sound is only about a century old.
And the sound. Because there is no fingerboard and the bridge is nearly flat, the bow tends to catch two strings at once. So the natural voice of the kemençe is drones and double-stops, two notes sounding together, often parallel fourths, with a buzzing droning texture underneath. This is not a clean single-line violin. New players sometimes fight this, trying to isolate one string and get annoyed. Do not. The doubled, droning sound is the instrument working correctly. It is the whole character of Black Sea music.
How to play the Black Sea kemençe: position, bow, and the fingers
You hold it vertically. Seated, it rests on your knee or thigh, tipped a little toward you. Standing, and players do play it standing and even while dancing, you hold it out in front, tilted. The pegbox points up and away.
The bow is short, around 50 to 60 cm, traditionally strung with hair from a horse’s tail. You keep it moving. Black Sea bowing is busy and constant, lots of quick back-and-forth, not long slow strokes.
And now the one thing I want you to remember about how to play kemençe, because it is the fact blogs get wrong most often. You stop the strings with the pads of your fingers, the fleshy front, exactly like a violin. Not the nails. The fingernail technique, touching the string from the side with the nail, belongs to the classical pear-shaped armudî kemençe, that other instrument I described up top. On the Black Sea kemençe it is finger pads. If someone tells you to use your nails on a boat-shaped kemençe, they are mixing up the two instruments. I say this with full confidence.
Where it lives: the horon, and a master to watch
The kemençe is the lead voice of the horon, the fast circular chain-dance of the eastern Black Sea. Dancers link up in a line or a ring, shoulders trembling, feet going quick and tight, and the kemençe drives all of it. As the dance goes on it speeds up, and the kemençe speeds up with it.
The horon runs in aksak rhythms, “limping” meters that do not divide evenly, 7/8, 5/8, 7/16. If you come from a 4/4 world these feel off-balance at first, and that lopsided push is exactly what makes people move.
One thing worth knowing, because guides tend to blur it: the kemençe is not the lead instrument everywhere on the coast. It dominates around Trabzon and Giresun. Move east into Rize and Artvin and the tulum, the bagpipe, takes over instead. And the whole tradition sits on shared Laz and Pontic Greek roots. After the 1923 population exchange the Greek side carried the instrument to Greece as the “Pontic lyra,” where it is still played today.
Some names to know. Picoğlu Osman (Osman Gökçe, 1901 to 1946) from Görele was one of the first recorded masters. And Katip Şadi (1932 to 2020), also from Görele, played for something like seventy years, cut 27 records, and was famous for inventing sung lyrics on the spot, making up verses live as he bowed.
You can watch Katip Şadi himself. This is him playing a horon live at the 2009 Giresun Çanakçı festival, the master in person. Watch how he sits the Black Sea kemençe on his knee, how the bow almost never stops, and listen for the lines he is singing, made up right there in the moment.
If you want to go deeper into the history, Wikipedia’s Kemençe of the Black Sea page is a solid place to read on.
How to choose one, and who it is for
A good kemençe is simple to judge. You want a clean single carved block with an even, well-fitted soundboard. You want pegs that actually hold, which is why ebony pegs are worth having. And you want it set up and ready with a bow, so you can pick it up and bow it the day it arrives.
You do not need a 999 dollar electric or a pro-level instrument to start. That is money spent on a level you cannot yet hear. Our Black Sea kemençe is 139 dollars: 55 cm, carved from mulberry, ebony pegs, tuned E-A-D, and it comes with the bow. It is a real, playable instrument, not a wall decoration, and it is the right thing to learn on. If you already play violin the crossover is quick, and if you do not, the three strings and the finger-pad stopping are a friendly place to begin.
Care
Not much to say here, and that is good news. The Black Sea kemençe is a durable little thing. Nothing much goes wrong with it beyond changing the strings now and then when they get old or dull. Keep it in ordinary room conditions, use the same common sense you would with any wooden instrument, and it will just keep playing. No fuss.
That is the kemençe. A carved boat of mulberry, three steel strings in fourths, a short busy bow, and a couple centuries of dancing behind it. If you have been curious about the sound, this is a good and honest instrument to start with, and we keep it in stock and set up in our shop. Come have a look, and write to us if you have questions before you buy.
Daniel Karni
Multi-instrumentalist, oud lover and an expert in Arabic & Turkish musical instruments. Founder of Ethnic Musical, working with luthiers across Turkey, Armenia, and beyond since 2009 to make fine handmade Turkish & Arabic musical instruments.