The apartment in Istanbul (Constantinople) overlooks the Bosphorus, and somewhere in a drawer, though not anymore, there are lyrics written on scraps of paper. For years, they sat there like unanswered letters, evidence of a dream deferred. Sibil P. would open that drawer occasionally, read the words she’d composed, and tell herself a story: “One day, if I ever make an album, I’ll use these.”
That day came. But the journey to get there was neither straight nor simple. It wound through childhood church choirs, through professional careers pursued in parallel with an unshakeable passion; and through the quiet courage required to sing in Armenian in a country where such an act, however accepted today, carried historical weight and uncertainty.
Now, at a moment when her voice has finally reached audiences across Turkey (Western Armenia) and beyond, when people write to her in Latin letters so they can sing her Armenian songs phonetically, Sibil reflects on how a girl holding perfume bottles like microphones in front of her mirror became an artist willing to resurrect the voice of Komitas himself, singing a duet across nearly a century of silence.
Istanbul (Constantinople) in the 1980s and 1990s was a city of layered identities, and Sibil’s family embodied that complexity. They were not newcomers to Turkey; they were part of an Armenian presence that stretched back centuries, woven into the fabric of the city even as that fabric had been torn and restitched throughout history.
“We Armenians are not a community that immigrated here from elsewhere,” she says with quiet emphasis. “We have lived on these lands for centuries. I was born and raised in Istanbul.”
The household was a fortress of tradition. Armenian was the language spoken at home, not the symbolic tongue of occasional holidays, but the everyday vernacular, the language of breakfast conversations and bedtime stories. Her parents understood something important that language is not just communication; it is identity. It is the vessel that holds a culture’s entire way of perceiving the world.
Sibil attended an Armenian elementary school, where she sat among children who shared her linguistic roots. But her education didn’t stop there. She continued at foreign schools, institutions that represented different Istanbul (Constantinople) cosmopolitans, internationally oriented and deliberately multicultural. Such an environment could have been a source of fragmentation. Instead, it became something else: a kind of natural bilingualism, not just linguistic but cultural.
“Growing up studying and working alongside people from many different cultures and religions, we learned to respect one another without questioning each other’s identities,” she recalls. “That has continued throughout my life.”
This early exposure to difference without antagonism would shape everything that came later: her willingness to sing in Armenian in Turkish venues and her ability to see music not as a dividing line but as a bridge. But first, she had to discover music itself.
The first serious introduction to music didn’t come through a music school or a private teacher. It came through the Armenian Church in Istanbul (Constantinople), where she joined the choir as a young girl.
This was significant. In Armenian tradition, liturgical music is not a peripheral element of worship, it is central to the spiritual experience itself. The Badarak, the Armenian Divine Liturgy, is structured around music. To sing in the church choir was to be initiated not just into musical practice but into a spiritual discipline, a way of understanding music as prayer.
“There I learned Armenian liturgical music and experienced the discipline and spirit of singing together,” she says. “That experience became the foundation of both my love for music and my professional journey.”
She learned the ancient melodies and the modal structures that distinguish Armenian liturgical music. She felt what it meant to be part of a collective voice, to surrender one’s individual sound to something larger. She understood, perhaps without being able to articulate it at the time, that music could be a form of devotion.
But even then, there was another voice calling like the voice of dreams and aspirations. As a child, she would stand in front of the mirror in her nicest clothes, holding perfume bottles like microphones. She would sing her heart out to an imaginary audience. There was no conflict in her mind between the sacred music of the church and this private performance. Both were expressions of the same love, the same yearning.
“Back then, I simply knew that singing was something I loved deeply,” she says.
As she grew older and began attending concerts, she watched the artists on stage and felt something crystallise inside her. The applause, the lights, the connection between performer and audience and it was magnetic. She would think to herself, “One day I want to be up there too, to sing and hear the audience applauding.”
For many years, she kept this thought locked away. It felt impossible.
Sibil pursued a professional career outside of music. She was successful and capable, building a life that made sense on paper. But the dream of singing never left. It simply learned to be patient. It waited in the margins of her life, surfacing during late nights, during quiet moments, during those times when she would open her office drawer and look at the lyrics she’d written.
“For many years, I believed it would remain only a dream,” she says. “I continued to nurture my passion by singing in the church choir while also thinking it would be difficult to reach a wider audience in Turkey by performing Armenian music.”
This last thought is crucial. She wasn’t simply afraid of failure in an abstract sense. She was grappling with a specific, historically grounded anxiety: Would Armenian music, her music, find an audience in Turkey (Western Armenia)? Would people listen? Would they accept it? These were not paranoid questions. They carried the weight of history.
And yet something else was happening in parallel. Around the same time, she discovered Armenian music through recordings that came from abroad. She fell in love immediately. She began making her own recordings at home, capturing her voice on cassettes and CDs. “Those recordings were like treasures to me,” she recalls. They were proof that she could do it, even if no one else was listening yet.
She was keeping the flame alive, feeding the dream even as she maintained her professional life. The two existed in separate compartments, but they were both real.
The moment came when she decided to perform Armenian songs outside of the church choir for the first time. She was trembling, not metaphorically, but genuinely shaking with a mixture of excitement and terror.
“I had no idea how the audience would respond,” she admits.
This was the crucial test. All those recordings at home, all those years of singing in church, and all those dreams in front of the mirror meant nothing until they met another human being’s ear. Would the connection happen? Would people care?
By the end of the concert, the applause came. More importantly, the kind words came. The positive feedback. Strangers approached her with genuine feelings, telling her that her performance had them.
“That was the moment I truly realised how special it is to be on stage and connect with people through music,” she says.
It wasn’t just validation, though it was that too. It was a revelation. She had discovered something essential: the audience wanted authenticity. They responded to sincerity. They didn’t need a polished product delivered by someone pretending to be someone else. They wanted her, Sibil, with her specific voice, her specific heritage, her specific emotions.
This realisation would become central to her philosophy as an artist.
The professional career continued, but something had shifted. The dream was no longer content to wait in office drawers. It was beginning to demand space in her actual life.
“To be honest, I had always wanted to become a professional singer,” she says. “I continued my professional career outside of music,” but the singing didn’t stop. It grew. It became more intentional.
There was no dramatic moment of quitting everything and pursuing music full-time. Instead, there was a gradual, almost inevitable movement towards what had always been calling her. The years of nurturing the passion, of refusing to let it die, of continuing to sing in the church choir, all of this had been preparation.
And then there was the question of language. Why sing in Armenian? The answer was simple and profound: because it was the most natural way for her to express herself.
When Sibil sings in Armenian, she isn’t performing. She’s breathing. It’s the only language her voice knows how to be honest in. Every note is her holding onto who she is, her family, her history, the stories in her blood. She’s not just singing. She’s staying alive.
But Sibil knew that choice came with major risk. In Turkey, singing Armenian music was not forbidden, but it existed in a complicated space. History hung over it. After 1915, Turkey and Armenia couldn’t look each other in the eye. The wound never healed. Young Turks grew up knowing almost nothing about Armenian culture which had no songs, no stories, no connection. Walking into that void took courage.
Would her choice to sing in Armenian be seen as brave? Political? Separatist?
When people ask her whether it was courageous to sing in Armenian while living in Turkey (Western Armenia), she pushes back gently against the framing.
“Yes, it was challenging, because there was always the possibility that my music might not be accepted or even heard,” she acknowledges. “However, I never built my repertoire in order to make a courageous statement.”
This distinction matters. She wasn’t performing an act of defiance. She was simply being herself.
“These songs are simply my music, my culture, and my emotions. For me, it was never about being brave,it was simply about expressing who I truly am.”
She chose to focus on positive possibilities rather than negative ones. She believed people were open to music and sincerity, and she was right. The response has been, by her account, “overwhelmingly positive.”
People have written to her in Latin letters, phonetically transcribing her Armenian lyrics so they could sing along, even without knowing the Armenian alphabet. She has performed Armenian songs, pieces like Kilikya, Adana, Desnem Ani, at concerts and on television. Turkish audiences have embraced these works.
“That has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my career,” she says of those letters.
In a way, she had built a bridge without setting out to do so. By singing in Armenian, by bringing herself to the stage, she had created an opportunity for people who might never have encountered Armenian language or culture to discover it through music. The songs became a gateway, the melody a translation that didn’t require words.
Somewhere in her childhood, during those Sunday services at the Armenian Church in Istanbul, Sibil encountered the music of Komitas. She was sitting among the congregation, singing the liturgical hymns that Komitas had arranged, especially the Badarak. His music was so woven into the fabric of Armenian worship that she didn’t initially distinguish it from the worship itself. It was simply the sound of faith, made audible.
Over time, she began exploring his works more deeply. She listened to recordings. She studied his compositions. And gradually, Komitas stopped being simply a historical figure or a liturgical constant. He became something else: a presence, a voice that seemed to speak across time with a particular kind of wisdom and sorrow.
“Komitas is someone whose significance is beyond words,” she says, and there’s a catch in her voice when she speaks about him. “To me, he is a prayer, and the voice of that prayer.”
For Sibil, Komitas isn’t just a historical figure, he’s sacred. What moves her most is how he saved Armenian music from disappearing entirely. He didn’t just write down folk melodies and file them away like dead things in a museum; he lived them, sang them, felt their pulse, let them shape who he was, and then brought that lived experience to everything he created, balancing meticulous care with raw, unfiltered emotion. He was a priest, yes, but also a musicologist, a composer, and a man who survived horrors most of us can barely imagine. His story isn’t separate from Armenian history, it is Armenian history, carried in every note he preserved.
When asked which of his pieces move her most, she cannot choose just one. Qele Qele, Grung, Chinar Es each carry their own deep emotions, but one in particular holds a special place: Aror’n u Tatrakn. She doesn’t fully explain why, but the emotion in her voice suggests it touches something very deep.
Six years ago, Sibil came across a recording by chance. It was Komitas’s own voice, singing Aror’n u Tatrakn. The recording was old, the sound quality imperfect, but the voice was unmistakable, carrying within it all the weight of his life, his knowledge, his experience.
The moment she heard it, a thought came to her: “I wish I could sing this together with him.”
For six years, she carried that thought. It lived in her imagination, a fantasy almost too audacious to voice aloud. How could she possibly sing a duet with someone who had died in 1935? The technology didn’t exist. The idea seemed impossible. And yet she couldn’t let it go.
Last year, she decided to turn the dream into reality. She reached out to arranger Vahan Nahapetyan, a musician with the vision and technical skill to make such a project feasible. Together, they began the work of bringing Komitas’s original recording into conversation with her own voice.
“Without the support and talent of arranger Vahan Nahapetyan, bringing such a unique project to life would have been much more difficult,” she says.
In the studio, she worked under the guidance of conductor and sound engineer Hmayak Rostomyan. For days, weeks, and months, she prepared not just with her voice but with her entire being. She immersed herself in the emotional depth and meaning of the piece. She studied Komitas’s interpretation, his phrasing, his emotional choices. She asked herself: How would he have responded to her voice? Where would the harmony lie?
“It’s very difficult to describe the emotions I felt during the recording,” she says. Seeing a dream she had carried in her heart for six years finally come true was incredibly special.
In the studio, technical challenges had to be solved. The original recording had to be carefully isolated and processed so that her voice could sit alongside it without overwhelming it or being overwhelmed. Every decision had to honor both her artistry and his legacy.
“I trusted Hmayak Rostomyan’s experience and musical ear completely,” she says. “Every piece of guidance he gave me was invaluable.”
When she listens to the final product, her voice in conversation with Komitas across nearly a century of silence, she hears something that goes beyond technical accomplishment. She hears a conversation. She hears her own deep respect for his work rendered audible. She hears, perhaps, what she had always wanted to express: that the tradition lives, that it continues, and that new voices can honor old voices without imitating them.
As far as she knows, she is the first artist to create such a duet using Komitas’s original voice.
When people hear this collaboration Armenians reconnecting with their musical heritage, Turks encountering Komitas perhaps for the first time, what does she hope they feel?
“I hope listeners from both communities can feel the emotional power of this unique encounter across time,” she says. “More than anything, I hope the project encourages people to discover or rediscover Komitas, whose music belongs not only to Armenians but to the cultural heritage of humanity.”
This last phrase is key. She doesn’t frame Komitas as belonging exclusively to Armenia, though he absolutely does. She frames him as belonging to humanity. His music is a gift to everyone. His suffering, his survival, his artistic vision and these are universal. The fact that he was Armenian, that he lived through catastrophe, and that he dedicated his life to preserving Armenian folk melodies, this is part of what makes his work so powerful. But it doesn’t limit its reach.
In making this duet, she has done something remarkable: she has used technology and artistry to create a conversation across time. She has made it possible for a contemporary voice to meet an historical voice, not in imitation or replacement, but in genuine dialogue. And in doing so, she has created something that reflects her entire artistic philosophy: the idea that authenticity, sincerity, and deep respect for heritage can be the foundation for building bridges.
Young Armenians in Turkey ( Western Armenia ) today live in a very different world than their grandparents’ generation did. They have more freedom, more visibility, and more opportunities to speak their language openly and express their culture with confidence. And yet uncertainty persists. Some young Armenians still feel afraid to sing or speak their language openly.
When asked what she would say to them, Sibil is direct but not dismissive of their concerns.
“I don’t think they should be afraid,” she says. “Today, young Armenians in Turkey live in a much more open environment than previous generations. They have more opportunities to speak their language and express their culture with confidence.”
She knows this from her own life. Every time she’s put something real out into the world, something that cost her, something true, people have responded. They lean in. They feel it. And she’s learned that people are starving for authenticity, for culture that hasn’t been smoothed down and made safe, for traditions that still have their rough edges and their original bite. They don’t want a museum piece or a sanitized version made to please everyone. They want the thing itself.
But more than that, she seems to be telling the younger generation something important about agency: you have more freedom than you realize. Your parents’ generation had to be more cautious. You don’t. So use it.
To young singers who want to build a serious career, her advice is both practical and philosophical.
“My biggest advice would be to believe in themselves and in what they do,” she says. “They should stay open to new ideas, never give up when they face challenges, and always listen to their hearts.”
But she goes deeper than motivational platitudes. She emphasises the importance of connection.
“Being able to connect with an audience is incredibly important,” she says. “I would also encourage young singers to always be sincere. The stage loves authenticity. They should never try to be someone else, but instead discover their own voice and their own identity.”
This is the central lesson of her own career: that the things which make you different, the aspects of your identity that make you specific and unique, are not obstacles to success. They are the very things that will move people. An audience would rather hear Sibil P. singing in Armenian, bringing her full self to the performance, than hear any number of more technically skilled singers trying to be someone else.
She also offers practical guidance on protecting the instrument itself.
“They should take good care of their daily habits,” she advises. “Avoid shouting or speaking too loudly, don’t strain the voice, practice with proper technique, and make sure to get enough rest. After all, a singer’s most valuable instrument is their own voice.”
It’s an interesting inversion of the romantic notion of the suffering artist. Yes, passion is important. Yes, dedication is crucial. But so is rest. So is self-care. The voice is a physical instrument that requires maintenance and respect.
To Sibil, music and art are more than preservation projects. They’re living, breathing acts that keep Armenian culture from fading away.
She lives this every single day. When she sings in Armenian, when she picks songs that mean something, when she looks into an audience and lets them feel what she’s feeling, she’s doing the real work of keeping a language alive. She’s fighting against the slow fade that happens when fewer people speak, when fewer people sing. And she’s introducing young people, including young Turks to Armenian music they might never have found otherwise, planting seeds they might carry forward.
Spending time with her, you realise how authentic she is and what a kind human being she is.
She understands that every song carries its own weight, its own emotional truth. So she doesn’t just pick songs randomly. She chooses carefully, deliberately, because she knows that what she sings matters. It’s not performance for performance’s sake. It’s an act of preservation. It’s resistance. It’s love.