Location: Asia Culture Center Library Park Hall 3

Date: 2018-09-07 ~ 2019-04-30

Host: Asia Culture Center, Ministry of Culture, Information and Tourism of Kyrgyzstan

Organization: Asia Culture Center, MD Insight

The epic trilogy narrates the story of Manas and his descendants, Semetey and Seytek, as they battle against their Khitan and Oirat enemies, struggling to unite the disparate tribes of Kyrgyz people into a single nation and reclaim their ancestral lands. The longest recorded version of the trilogy is 553,000 lines long.

It is performed at many public occasions, from village festivals to national holidays. Recitals of the poem can take up to 13 hours, and many Kyrgyz historians claim the poem is the longest oral epic in the world.