On a foggy morning in the Pontic Mountains of northeastern Turkey, where steep green slopes fall toward a sea that is rarely calm, a sound rises that is hard to mistake for anything else. It is at once ancient and urgent, joyful and mournful — a sound that seems to express the personality of the landscape itself: beautiful, demanding, slightly wild. This is the tulum, Turkey's native bagpipe, and it has been the defining sound of Black Sea culture for longer than anyone can clearly document.

The tulum holds an unusual position among the world's bagpipes: it is one of the surviving traditions outside the Celtic world that has kept real continuity with its traditional performance context. While Scottish pipers play at Highland Games and folk festivals, the tulum is still the instrument you hear at an actual Black Sea wedding, still the instrument that drives the horon line dance into its characteristic frenzy, still the instrument young musicians in Rize, Trabzon, and Artvin often learn from older relatives rather than from video tutorials.

That deep rootedness in one particular landscape is both the tulum's limitation and its power. This guide covers what the instrument is, how it differs from the bagpipes you may already know, the culture it animates, and what to look for if you decide to bring one home.

What Is the Tulum? Anatomy of a Mountain Bagpipe

The tulum is a bagpipe — an aerophone in which the player blows air into a bag that acts as an air reservoir. The steady pressure from the bag drives the chanter (the melodic pipe) continuously, so the melody never has to pause for breath. If you have read our ney guide, the contrast is striking: the ney is shaped entirely by the player's audible breath, while the tulum removes the breath from the sound altogether and replaces it with an unbroken stream of air.

The traditional tulum has three main components:

That complete absence of a separate drone pipe is the tulum's most important structural difference from most European bagpipes — and the key to its sound, as we will see below.

How the Tulum Differs from the Scottish Highland Pipes

Many listeners meet the tulum with expectations formed by Scottish bagpipes. The two instruments share the bag-and-chanter principle and almost nothing else:

The most musically significant difference is the absence of drones. Highland pipe music rests on a constant harmonic backdrop from its three drone pipes. Tulum music has no such backdrop; the only harmonic content is the gentle beating between the two parallel chanters. This gives tulum music a more naked, exposed quality — there is nowhere to hide a melodic weakness, but there is also nothing standing between the listener and the melody.

Where the Tulum Lives — and Its Caucasian Cousins

The tulum is the characteristic instrument of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast — above all the provinces of Rize, Artvin, and Trabzon, with a presence reaching toward Giresun and Ordu. The region is culturally distinctive: it is home to the Laz people, whose Kartvelian language is closely related to Georgian, and was home to Pontic Greek communities until the population exchange of 1923.

The Pontic connection

The Pontic Greeks of this coast played their own bagpipe, the tsampouna — a name related to the Italian zampogna, hinting at a shared Mediterranean–Anatolian bagpipe heritage. The tsampouna and the tulum appear to be parallel developments that influenced each other over centuries of coexistence. After 1923, Pontic refugees carried their tradition to northern Greece, where it survives today — a living mirror of the Anatolian tulum.

The Caucasian connection

Close relatives of the tulum also live across the Caucasus: the Georgian gudastviri and chiboni, the Azerbaijani tulum, and the Armenian parkapzuk. These instruments share the double-chanter design (or variations of it) and cluster geographically around the Caucasus mountain corridor — evidence of a common regional origin or long historical diffusion through these highlands.

The Horon: Culture and Celebration

The dance the tulum was built for

The tulum's primary social function is driving the horon — the line dance of the Black Sea coast, unlike any other Turkish folk dance. Where most Anatolian dances move at moderate tempos, the horon is physically extreme: dancers stand in a tight line, arms on each other's shoulders, performing rapid trembling movements — shoulders, knees, feet — at tempos that look mechanically impossible until you see them with your own eyes.

That characteristic trembling (titreme) is inseparable from the tulum's sound. The instrument's continuous, vibrating tone seems to enter the dancers' bodies directly — at a traditional celebration, a skilled tulum player can drive a horon line into a state that witnesses often describe as trance-like.

Weddings and the yayla

Like the zurna-davul pairing of western Anatolia, the tulum is the central instrument of Black Sea weddings — traditionally multi-day celebrations where professional players (tulumcular) know the specific tunes for each stage of the ceremony. The tulum is also the music of yayla culture: the seasonal migration between lowland villages and high mountain pastures, with all the anticipation, freedom, and melancholy that rhythm of life carries.

The Sound of the Tulum: Beating Chanters and Microtones

The beat-frequency effect

The two chanters of a tulum are never perfectly in tune — by design. A slight detuning between them (typically a few cents to around 15 cents) produces a beating effect: the two tones interfere, creating a periodic pulse in the sound — the tulum's characteristic shimmer. Faster beating (pipes closer in pitch) gives a buzzy, intense quality; slower beating gives a more open, spacious sound. Skilled makers voice the double chanter to the beating rate characteristic of their regional style — one of the subtle marks of a well-made instrument.

Microtonal inflections

Like other Anatolian winds, the tulum produces pitches between the semitones of the Western scale, using half-holing and bag-pressure variation. The third degree of the scale in Black Sea music often sits slightly below the Western major third — a "neutral third" that is neither major nor minor and gives the regional sound much of its color. If that world of in-between intervals interests you, our kanun guide explores how Turkish makam music organizes microtones in far greater depth.

Learning to Play the Tulum

The fundamental challenge: three-way coordination

The good news first: unlike the edge-blown ney, where the first clean note can take weeks, a tulum chanter speaks as soon as the bag has pressure. The real challenge is coordination. The player must do three things at once:

1. Maintain a steady squeeze on the bag with the upper arm to keep air pressure constant.
2. Keep blowing into the bag through the blowpipe to replenish the air supply.
3. Finger fast melodic patterns on both chanter pipes simultaneously.

This arm-breath-finger coordination is the core motor skill of all bagpipe playing, and it takes patient, regular practice to stabilize. Uneven bag pressure is instantly audible as a wavering pitch — which is why steady long tones, not fast tunes, are the right first exercise.

How players learn

Traditionally, tulum playing passed through family lineage and apprenticeship: young musicians followed experienced players for years, absorbing repertoire and regional style by imitation. Today some Turkish conservatories — notably in Trabzon — teach tulum within their folk music programs, but the most valued instruction still comes from traditional masters in the eastern Black Sea itself. For students elsewhere, recordings are the essential resource: immersive, repeated listening to master players is the closest available substitute for apprenticeship.

Famous Tulum Players

Which Tulum Should You Buy?

Here is the honest version of tulum buying advice. The tulum is a specialist instrument: it is handmade in small numbers, a real goat-skin bag is labor-intensive to prepare, and the double chanter must be voiced by ear. That is reflected in the price of any authentic instrument — there is no meaningful "cheap tulum" tier, and a non-playing souvenir will only frustrate you. Traditional skin-bag instruments also need periodic care (re-waxing and conditioning the hide) but reward it with the classic resonance synthetic bags don't quite match.

What to check before buying any tulum

• Bag integrity: with the chanter holes covered, a squeezed bag should hold pressure for roughly 30 seconds.
• Chanter voicing: the two pipes should sit close in pitch but not identical — that controlled detuning is the sound.
• Finger hole placement: holes should be comfortably reachable for your hand size.
• Craftsmanship: neat stitching, well-fitted joints, clean finish on the chanter.

$1,499 Professional · Limited Stock

Curious about the wider bagpipe family? The Persian ney anban — the bagpipe of southern Iran — occasionally appears in our catalogue as well (currently out of stock). And if the Black Sea sound calls to you but the tulum's price or maintenance gives you pause, the region's other wind voices — the kaval and the duduk — offer related modal worlds at friendlier entry points.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the tulum hard to learn?

The chanter itself speaks immediately — easier than an edge-blown flute. The difficulty is coordinating steady arm pressure on the bag, continuous blowing, and two-handed fingering at once. Expect weeks of steady-tone practice before tunes feel controlled.

Does the tulum have drones like Scottish bagpipes?

No. The tulum has no drone pipes at all. Its shimmering, drone-like quality comes from the slight intentional detuning between its two parallel chanter pipes.

What is the tulum's bag made of?

Traditionally the intact hide of a young goat or sheep, treated with tallow or wax to stay airtight. Skin bags need occasional re-conditioning; some modern instruments use synthetic bags, which trade some resonance for lower maintenance.

What music is the tulum used for?

Above all the horon line dance of the eastern Black Sea, plus wedding repertoire and yayla (mountain pasture) tunes. Since the 1990s it has also appeared in Black Sea folk-rock, notably in the music of Kazım Koyuncu.

Why are authentic tulums expensive?

Each instrument is handmade in small numbers: preparing a real skin bag is slow, careful work, and the twin chanter pipes must be voiced against each other by ear. There is no factory version worth playing — the price reflects genuine craft labor.

Sources: Picken, Laurence, Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (Oxford University Press, 1975), on the tulum and Anatolian aerophones; UNESCO and Turkish Ministry of Culture documentation of Black Sea horon traditions; ethnomusicological literature on Pontic tsampouna and Caucasian bagpipes (gudastviri, chiboni, parkapzuk); discography of Kazım Koyuncu and the Black Sea folk revival.