/ Ayrılıq, meaning "Separation") is an Azerbaijani folk song with lyrics by Farhad Ebrahimi and music composed by Ali Salimi in 1957.
[1] Composer and tar player Ali Salimi's family suffered the harsh policies of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and fled Soviet Azerbaijan for Ardabil in Iranian Azerbaijan to the south.
[1] He had been searching for lyrics on which to base a composition to express the motif of "separation", i.e. the "separation from family members, relatives and loved ones-separation from home town and home villages over on the other side of the Araz River".
[1] Ayrılıq was first recorded by Ali Salimi's wife Fatma Qennadi[1] (under her artist name Vartush) for Tehran radio, where they used to work.
Later the famous Azerbaijani singer of Soviet Union, Rashid Behbudov, visited Tehran in 1963, where he learned about the song.