Biography

Hanka Paldum is a Bosnian Sevdalinka singer and founder of the record label Sarajevo Disk. She is regarded as one of the best female sevdah performers of the 20th century and is popular in her home country of Bosnia as well as in the rest of the former Yugoslavia.

She was born in the eastern Bosnian town of Cajnice to Muslim Bosniak parents Mujo and Pemba. Her father was a logger and her mother wove carpets to provide additional financial assistance for the family, as her fathers salary was not enough to carry a family of seven. Hanka, the oldest female child, began helping her mother with housework at the age of five. When Paldum was seven years of age, her parents moved the family from Cajnice to the Vratnik neighbourhood within the Sarajevo municipality of Stari Grad.

Paldum started singing in the first grade, as part of the choir in her primary school. She would continue singing throughout her childhood.

At the age of twelve, Hanka's brother Mustafa, a member of the Bratstvo (Brotherhood) cultural association, encouraged her to sneak out through her bedroom window and sing at the association events, promising to "cover" for her. She would sing for 15 to 20 minutes and run back home. The director of the House of Culture named Marijan Ravlic, asked her parents to allow her to sing at some local events. Her father allowed it, but with only with the presence of her older brother, Mustafa, who was no less strict than their father. Then Hanka began to sing in amateur contests, which she often won, with the award being chocolate with rice or ten tickets for the cinema. She shared the chocolates, while tickets for the theater remained unused because of her father's strictness.

After three years of struggle, Hanka proved to her parents her passion for music and said she wanted to enroll in a music school.
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