Badakhshan Ensemble has been played on NTS in shows including NTS Guide to…, featured first on 11 November 2021. Songs played include Falak-I Badakhshani.

The Badakhshan Ensemble was the brainchild of Soheba Davlatshoeva (Сохиба Давлатшоева, born 1970), a singer and dancer who grew up in a small village on the Ghund River, fifty miles from Khoroq, Badakhshan’s capital and, with a population of around 50,000, its largest town.

“We created the ensemble ourselves,” Soheba recounted proudly. “It’s not a state-sponsored group. We were students in the Institute of Arts in Dushanbe Tajikistan’s capital at the end of the 1980s. We finished one semester there, and…