Jadagan

The jadagan (Khakas: чадыған, romanized: çadığan, Russian: чатхан, romanized: chatkhan, or Siberian harp) is a wooden board zither of the Khakas people in Siberia.

The jadagan usually has 6 or 7 strings stretched across movable bridges and tuned a fourth or fifth apart.

[1] The instrument was considered to be sacrosanct and playing it was a rite bound to taboos.

It was mainly used at court and in monasteries, since strings symbolised the twelve levels of the palace hierarchy.

Folklorist Nancy Thym-Hochrein has researched the instrument,[2] and musician Raphael De Cock is a contemporary player.