Semah (Alevi Ritual Dance)

Semah is no entertainment dance but an act of worship. It is performed in the cem — the Alevi prayer house — at the heart of the zikr rite. Men and women turn together (rare in conventional Islam) around a circle, one arm raised to God, one to the earth, slowly at first then accelerating in self-rotation like dervishes, but as a collective. The spinning evokes the rotation of the planets around the sun and the unity of all beings in the one God. It is played on the saz — long-necked Anatolian lute — and the deyiş, devotional poems in Kurmanji and Zazaki, are chanted. Semah is a long-suppressed heritage of Alevi Kurds, banned by the Turkish authorities for decades before European diaspora communities revived it in recent times.