World Bard Song Day Date in the current year: December 22, 2025

The term bard is borrowed from Celtic cultures, where bards were oral repositories and professional storytellers. As the original bardic tradition declined, it was repurposed by Romantic writers to mean a famous author. For example, William Shakespeare is often referred to as the Bard of Avon or simply the Bard.

In the Soviet Union, the term bard was again repurposed in the 1960s to refer to singers-songwriters who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment and performed them for small groups of people, typically accompanied by a Russian guitar. Such songs were also called author songs, because they were usually performed by the songwriters themselves.

Initially, the term bard song was applied to student and tourist songs composed in the 1950s, and inspired by values such as friendship, courage, cooperation, trust, mutual support, and risk-taking. These songs were usually sung around campfires during camping trips. Tourist songs eventually developed into a broader genre of the bard song called romantic songs, which touched on a wide range of topics including everyday life, the bards’ hometowns, the Eastern Front of WWII (called the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union), and many others.

During the Brezhnev stagnation era, the bard song genre expanded to include political songs that expressed protest against the regime and the Soviet way of life. Some of these songs were allegorical and subtly satirical, in the best tradition of Aesop’s fables, while others were sharply political and openly critical of the regime.

Romantic author songs were generally tolerated by the Soviet government, while the treatment of bards who wrote and performed political songs varied. Some bards maintained a balance between romantic and subtly political material in their repertoire, which allowed them to get away with songs that could be considered “anti-Soviet”. Others, such as Alexander Galich, were persecuted and forced to emigrate for criticizing the regime.

Famous Soviet bards who were active during the “golden age” of the bard song (from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s) include Yuri Vizbor, Alexander Dulov, Bulat Okudzhava, Novella Matveyeva, Alexander Galich, Yuri Kukin, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Willi Tokarev, Alexander Novikov, Verokina Dolina, Vladimir Vysotsky, Oleg Mityaev, Viktor Berkovsky, Sergey Nikitin and his wife Tatyana, Alexander Dolsky, Yevgeny Klyachkin, Vladimir Turiansky, Leonid Dukhovny, Alexander Mirzayan, Vera Matveyeva, Viktor Luferov, Alexander Sukhanov, Vladimir Lantsberg, and others.

World Bard Song Day was created around 2000 by singer-songwriter Konstantin Shlyamov. It is celebrated on December 22 because it is the shortest day of the year, and a long winter night is probably the best opportunity to gather with friends, sing your favorite songs, and pay tribute to bards past and present. According to tradition, bards around the world sing Bulat Okudzhava’s song “Molitva” (“Prayer”) at 4 p.m. Moscow time to celebrate World Bard Day.