Epic of Manas

The Epic of Manas is a traditional epic poem of the Kyrgyz people of Central Asia, composed and transmitted orally in the Kyrgyz language by specialist bards known as manaschi, who recite it in an unaccompanied melodic chant. The poem is extraordinarily long, running to an estimated 553,500 lines in its full recorded form, with the best-known version, recorded from the bard Sayakbay Karalaev, exceeding two million words, roughly twenty times the combined length of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and it holds the Guinness World Record for the longest epic poem. Rather than being fixed in a single written text, the epic evolved over many centuries through oral performance, with the earliest known written reference to its hero appearing in a Persian manuscript from 1792, and it narrates the deeds of eight generations of Kyrgyz heroes, chiefly the trilogy of Manas, his son Semetey and his grandson Seytek, in their conflicts with neighboring peoples. The epic is central to Kyrgyz national identity and remains a living oral tradition performed by manaschi into the present day.