A Millennium of Turkish Literature: A Concise History

Timeless Tales

55 Timeless Tales olktales, second only to poetry, have been alive as a constant genre in Turkish literature. A great many traditional Turkish tales were and still are introduced with the following tekerleme (a formulaic jingle with numerous variants): A long, long time ago, when the sieve was inside the straw, when the donkey was the town crier and the camel was the barber . . . Once there was; once there wasn’t. God’s creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin . . . In this lilting overture, one finds the spirit and some of the essential features of the Turkish folktale: the vivid imagination, irreconcilable paradoxes, rhythmic structure (with built-in syllabic meters and internal rhymes), a comic sense bordering on the absurd, a sense of the mutability of the world, the aesthetic urge to avoid loquaciousness, the continuing presence of the past, and the narrative’s predilection to maintain freedom from time and place. In Anatolia’s culture, oral literature has played a vibrant role since the earliest times. Aesop came from Phrygia, whose capital, Gordion, stood on a site not far from Ankara, the capital of modern Turkey. Homer was probably born and reared near present-day Izmir and wandered up and down the Aegean coast amassing the tales and legends that came to be enshrined in his Iliad and Odyssey. Several millennia of the narrative arts have bequeathed to Asia Minor a dazzlingtreasury—creationmyths,Babylonianstories,TheEpicofGilgamesh, 56  A Millennium of Turkish Literature Hittite tales, biblical lore, Greek and Roman myths, Armenian and Byzantine anecdotes. The peninsula’s mythical and historical ages nurtured dramatic accounts of deities, kings, heroes, and lovers. Pagan cults, ancient faiths, the Greek pantheon, Judaism, Roman religions, Christianity, Islam, mystical sects, and diverse spiritual movements left behind an inexhaustible body of legends and moralistic stories that survived throughout the centuries in their original forms or in many modified versions. Anatolia’s narrative art is a testament to the Turkish passion for stories about heroism, love, and honor. As the Turks embraced Islam and its civilization and founded the Selçuk state (mid–eleventh century) and then the Ottoman state (in the closing years of the thirteenth century), they developed a passion for the rich written and oral literature of the Arabs and Persians. Having brought along their own indigenous narratives in their horizontal move from Central Asia to Asia Minor, they now acquired the vertical heritage of the earlier millennia of Anatolian cultures, cults, and epic imagination as well as the Islamic narrative tradition in its Arabo-Persian context. The resulting synthesis was to yield a vast reservoir of stories. It would also give impetus to the creation of countless new tales down through the ages, for all ages. The synthesis was significantly enriched by the lore of Islamic mysticism . Romantic and didactic mesnevis (long narratives composed in rhymed couplets) compelled the elite poets’ attention. Perhaps the most profoundly influential masterpiece of the genre was the Mesnevi written in Persian by the prominent thirteenth-century Sufi thinker Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi (1207–73). Referred to as the “Koran of Mysticism” and the “Inner Truth of the Koran,” this massive work of close to twenty-six thousand couplets comprises a wealth of mystico-moralistic tales, fables, and stories of wisdom. Ottoman elite poets produced—often with the inspiration or story lines they took from The Thousand and One Nights, Kalila wa Dimna, Firdawsi’s Shahnamah, Attar’s Mantiq at-Tayr, Nizami’s Khamsa (Five Narratives), and many others—impressive mesnevis, including Leyla vü Mecnun (Leylā and Mejnūn1 ) by Fuzuli (d. 1556) and Hüsn ü Aşk (Beauty 1. Fuzuli, Leylā and Mejnūn, translated by Sofi Huri (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970). Timeless Tales  57 and Love) by Şeyh Galib (d. 1799), both allegories of mystical love; Hikâyati Deli Birader (Mad Brother’s Anecdotes), a garland of humorous and salacious stories by Mehmed Gazali (d. 1535); and Şevkengiz, a funny debate between a ladies’ man and a pederast by Vehbi (d. 1809). From the urban-establishment writers came some remarkable works that incorporate stories from the oral tradition, principally the Seyahatname , the massive travelogue and cultural commentary by Evliya Çelebi (d. 1682), and the fascinating Muhayyelât (Imaginary Lives) by Aziz Efendi (d. 1798), a collection of three unrelated novellas that amalgamate fantastic tales, novelistic depictions of life in Istanbul, preternatural occurrences, mystical components, and selections from the repertoires...