Ask anyone to name a bagpipe country and the answer arrives in about a second: Scotland. Kilts, castles, a lone piper on a misty hill. Now go to a village wedding in eastern Serbia, or a mountain festival in Bulgaria, and a man with a goatskin under his arm starts a dance tune over a deep, droning note. It's a bagpipe, it works on the same principle as the Scottish one, and nobody can prove which is older. So how does one instrument end up equally at home in a Highland regiment and an eastern Serbian village? The answer has more to do with shepherds and history than with tartan.
What a Bagpipe Actually Is
The trick is the bag. A bagpipe is a reed instrument fed from a reservoir of air, so the sound never stops while the player takes a breath. A set has at least a bag, a chanter, and usually a drone. The chanter is the pipe with finger holes that carries the melody. The drones are pipes without holes, each holding one steady note underneath. That constant note is why bagpipe music sounds the way it does: the tune moves over a floor that never moves.
Most pipes are blown by mouth through a blowpipe with a one-way valve. Some are inflated by a small bellows strapped to the arm, which keeps the air dry and the tuning calmer. Those are the Irish uilleann pipes (the name means "pipes of the elbow") and several British smallpipes. The bag was traditionally an animal skin, usually goat or sheep, and today it is often synthetic.
Older Than Scotland
Nobody can name the person or the year that put a bag on a reed pipe, and anyone who does is selling something. Ancient writers describe a ruler, probably Nero, who could play a pipe with his mouth or with a bladder tucked under his arm. Historians read that as a bag-blown pipe, but modern scholarship leans toward seeing such instruments as variants of ordinary mouth-blown pipes, not yet a separate family with drones. Older claims, like a Hittite carving from around 1000 BC, are disputed: another reading says it shows a pan flute and a drum.
The picture gets solid in the Middle Ages. The Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Santa Maria from 13th-century Castile show several kinds of bagpipe. Chaucer's Miller blows one to lead the pilgrims out of town around 1380. Carvers put pipers on church choir stalls, and Brueghel and Dürer painted peasants playing them. The oldest physical piece of a bagpipe found so far is a chanter from Rostock in Germany, dated to the late 14th or early 15th century. Real instruments from before 1700 are extremely rare, but the art is clear: there was no single bagpipe. Every region had its own.
Where the idea came from, the Middle East, Central Asia or somewhere else, is uncertain. By the Middle Ages the bagpipe was common from Spain to Poland, and it was a poor person's instrument, loud and outdoors, made from what a shepherd had at hand. Manuscript margins show pipers playing next to fiddlers and harpists, as ordinary as any other musician.
Scotland: The Pipe That Went Global
The Great Highland bagpipe has a bag, a blowpipe, a nine-note chanter, and three drones: two tenor and one bass. Scottish written evidence is thin before the 15th century. There are "warpipes" at the Battle of the North Inch of Perth in 1396 and a clear French account of pipes at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547. In the 1600s Highland piping families, the MacCrimmons best known among them, built the solo tradition called piobaireachd (pibroch), slow and ceremonial music tied to chiefs and clan history. The modern form of the instrument probably settled in the 18th century.
Then comes the story everyone tells: after Culloden in 1746, the British banned the bagpipes. It's mostly a myth. The Act of Proscription disarmed the Highlands and, in a companion Dress Act, banned the kilt, the plaid and other Highland clothing, with six months in jail for a first offense. Pipes aren't in the text, and no one is known to have been prosecuted under it for playing or owning them. The confusion may come from a real case. A piper named James Reid, who served in a Jacobite regiment, was tried at York in 1746. The court reasoned that a Highland regiment never marched without a piper, so in law his bagpipe was "an instrument of war". Reid was hanged. That was one man's trial, not a ban, though the loss of clan chiefs as patrons and heavy emigration did hurt piping badly.
What saved the Highland pipe was the army. Highland regiments raised in the later 1700s had pipers, and as the British Empire grew, so did the sound. Pipers played into battle until the heavy losses of the First World War largely ended the practice, though a few were revived for set-piece attacks later. Along the way the instrument reached Canada, Australia, India, Oman and the police and fire departments of the United States. Brittany even borrowed the whole idea: its bagad bands play the Scottish pipe (the binioù bras), imported in the late 1800s. When you see a bagpipe in a movie, it's almost always this one.
Serbia: The Gajde Nobody Told You About
In Serbian the instrument is gajde (plural, like trousers), and the player is a gajdaš. A Highland piper would know the layout at once: a bag, a mouth-blown pipe, a chanter, a drone. The chanter is the gajdenica, with six to eight finger holes, traditionally carved from boxwood, dogwood or plum and finished with a curved end that was once buffalo horn. The reed, the pisak, is cut from marsh cane or elder. The bag, the mešina, is kid or lamb skin cured in lime water with the fur turned inward. The difference is the drone: one prdaljka (also called bordun or drndalo) in three sliding sections, not three separate pipes. Old makers also hung a wild boar's tooth or a raptor's claw from the chanter as a charm, and used it to cut the beeswax that tunes the reed.
There isn't one Serbian gajde, either. The Serbian sources describe several types: the south Morava type played from Niš down into Macedonia, the three-voice gajde of the Svrljig area with two chanter pipes, and the Banat and Vojvodina gajde with a bag and a double chanter. The practice is on Serbia's national intangible heritage register, listed by the Center for Intangible Cultural Heritage as "Sviranje na gajdama", a solo tradition on two-voice and three-voice pipes. The register names an eastern belt (Negotin, Zaječar, Bor, Požarevac, Svrljig, Niš, Leskovac) and Vojvodina, mostly Banat around Kikinda, Zrenjanin and Pančevo. It is not on UNESCO's list, unlike its neighbors' pipes below.
The repertoire is dance and ritual, not military. The register lists dances, songs, improvisations and ritual pieces for harvest, weddings, funerals and the koledari processions of southeastern Serbia. Radisavljević's study of Serbian gajde describes a wedding gajdaš playing a different melody for each stage of the rite, with named dances for the groom, the mother-in-law and the wedding elder. At a sabor, the gajdaš traditionally stands in the middle of the kolo while the circle of dancers turns around him. People had mixed feelings about him: the music was pure joy, and in folk belief the gajde were also a devil's instrument. Radisavljević adds that no painted gajde appear in Serbian churches and monasteries.
The decline is recent. Until the Second World War the gajde were the main village instrument in many parts of eastern Serbia, and after the war the accordion took over. Today the pipes survive through enthusiasts and festivals. The best known is the Sabor gajdaša balkanskih zemalja in Svrljig, held every summer (the 18th edition was in 2025), with guests from Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Croatia and Greece. The date has moved between early August and early September (Saturday 6 September in 2025). The region's own 5 days in Niš is the logical base.
The Neighbors Got UNESCO Listings
Serbia's neighbors got to the international list first. In 2024 UNESCO inscribed the gayda and tulum bagpipe of North Macedonia and Turkey (a joint nomination), made with a boxwood chanter and goat or sheep skin. In 2025 it added bagpipes and bagpipe playing in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian star is the kaba gaida of the Rhodope Mountains, bigger and lower than the usual gaida. A Rhodope kaba gaida accompanied Valya Balkanska on "Izlel e Delyo Haydutin," one of the songs on the Voyager Golden Record launched into space in 1977. A Balkan saying goes that a wedding without a bagpipe is like a funeral.
The Rest of the Family
Think of European bagpipes in three groups. The first is the loud outdoor kind, mouth-blown and built for crowds. The Highland pipe is the famous example, and so is the Galician gaita, the pipe of Galicia and northern Portugal, which has a medieval history and was revived in the 19th century. Spain's gaita, Bulgaria's gaida and Slovakia's gajdy look like the same word, and one theory, from the linguist Joan Coromines, traces it to a Gothic word for "goat." Serbian sources offer another, Arabic-Turkish one, so treat the etymology as unsettled.
The second group is the quiet indoor kind. Ireland's uilleann pipes are bellows-blown, with a two-octave chanter and extra pipes called regulators that play chords. They were added to UNESCO's list in 2017. The third group is the shepherd and festival kind, tied to a season or a ritual. Italy's zampogna comes down from the mountains at Christmas, and the carol "Tu scendi dalle stelle" is derived from zampogna music. Slovakia's bagpipe culture was added to UNESCO's list in 2015. Czechia has a whole biennial festival in Strakonice. Brittany pairs its small binioù kozh with a bombard, a loud double-reed instrument, for dances.
Go further and you reach Turkey's tulum, and bagpipes in North Africa, West Asia and around the Persian Gulf. In Oman and Jordan the Highland pipe arrived with British forces and settled in beside an older local tradition.
One Instrument, Two Homes: Why Scotland and Serbia?
Historians don't give one answer, but the usual account runs like this. As Western classical music developed, bagpipes fell out of favor in many places because their range and volume were fixed, and cities and courts moved on to instruments that could play any key. In the countryside nobody needed a pipe to change key, so the old ones carried on, and the countryside is where the flocks were. The bag and the reed came from the animals, and the music was for dancing outdoors. The Scottish Highlands and the Balkan hills are two places that stayed rural long enough for that to matter.
After that the two stories split, because each pipe found a different patron. Scotland got an institution: the army. A single type of pipe was standardized, taught, and carried around the world. The Balkans got no empire to export it, but kept a village tradition that ran through weddings, harvests and feast days until the Second World War, after which the accordion became the main village instrument. Today ethno and folk groups, and the sabors, give the gajde a second life. So the difference isn't that one place has bagpipes and the other doesn't. Scotland's pipe spread through ceremony and empire, and the Serbian one survived by being useful to the village. Same ancestor, same shepherd's materials, two careers.
Where to Hear Them
Scotland is the easiest place to hear pipes at scale. The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo is held every August at Edinburgh Castle, with the next run set for 6 to 28 August 2027. In Glasgow, Piping Live! runs 8 to 13 August 2027, ending as the World Pipe Band Championships open on Glasgow Green (13 and 14 August). Plan around 5 days in Edinburgh or 5 days in Glasgow, and add 5 days in Dublin if you'd rather hear the uilleann pipes in a pub.
Elsewhere, the Strakonice bagpipe festival in Czechia is held every two years, most recently in August 2026, so the next one is due in 2028 (check the organizer for dates). Galicia's Ortigueira festival of Celtic music is set for 7 to 11 July 2027. For gajde in Serbia, aim for the Svrljig sabor in late summer, and check the organizer's page for the current date. Our Serbia and Bulgaria pages cover the wider trip, and 5 days in Belgrade is the easy way in. If you want to test where all these countries are first, try Pinpoint.
