Burial place of ballet dancer Leyla Bedir Khan found

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The grave of famous Kurdish ballet dancer Leyla Bedir Khan has been found in a cemetery in Paris.

Kurdish singer Pervin Chakar announced in a tweet that the grave of ballet dancer Leyla Bedir Khan has been found after intensive research in Saint-Cloud Municipal Cemetery in Paris. 

During her career, Bedir Khan had often been announced on stage with the ethnically dignified title “The Kurdish Princess.” She is considered the first female in Kurdistan's history to gain widespread recognition for her ballet dancing.

According to the inscription on her grave, she was born in 1907. 

Bedir Khan was the daughter of Abdurrezzak Bedir Khan and the granddaughter of Bedir Khan Beg. In 1913, after the order to exterminate the Bedir Khan family, Leila, and her mother were forced to migrate from the Ottoman Empire to Egypt, where she spent her childhood.

After World War I, she moved to Europe, where she starred in the Concert Hall in Vienna in 1924, mixing Indo-Aryan and Middle Eastern influences into her unorthodox style of dance. 

Afterwards, she studied in Switzerland and then graduated from the Institute of Ballet in Germany. She later appeared as a ballet dancer at the La Scala opera house in Milan in 1932 and the New York World Fair in 1939.

After World War II, Badir Khan ended her ballet career and settled in France, where she opened a dance school in Paris. She passed away in 1986.