Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

Körog˘lu
This folk poet, who probably lived in the sixteenth century, became a legendary 
hero because of his rebellion against oppression and exploitation in the rural 
areas. Succeeding generations have celebrated him as a symbol of courage in 
deed and in words.
In one poem, Körog˘lu challenged the Bey (Lord) of Bolu:
Here I send my greetings to the Bey of Bolu!
He should come up these hills and get his comeuppance
As the rustling of arrows keeps echoing through
And the clanking of shields resounds off the mountains.
In the same poem, Körog˘lu tells the story of meeting the bey’s forces:
Then we were faced with legions of the enemy
And on our brows appeared dark words of destiny.
Rifl es were invented—that ruined bravery:
Now the curved sword has to stay in its sheath and rust.
But Körog˘lu and his braves never lost their indomitable spirit:
Even so, Körog˘lu’s fame as a hero will glow!
Enemies will fl ee as I deal blow after blow,
Covered with all that froth from my Gray Horse’s mouth
And with my trousers steeped in the blood of the foe!
When people in nearby villages heard that their hero’s forces were vastly outnum-
bered, they rushed to give Körog˘lu their support. Most of them did not even have 
bows and arrows, let alone rifl es: they brought their pickaxes and shovels. The bey 
was frightened by this massive turnout of support, these multitudes ready to give 
their lives for the rebel cause, and he ordered his army to retreat. Körog˘lu rejoiced:
The hero holds fast, cowards fl ee,
The battlefi eld rumbles and roars.
Supreme king’s court opens its doors:
The palace shakes, rumbles and roars.

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Ottoman Glories
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The proud hero will never yield.
His arrows pound the battlefi eld;
When his mace strikes hard at the shield
That huge shield shakes, rumbles and roars.
Arrows are shot from his fortress:
May God save you from that distress!
Hearing Körog˘lu’s battle cries,
Every place shakes, rumbles and roars.
Popular culture in the Ottoman state, keeping alive the Turkic rather 
than the Islamic patterns of thought and values, also constituted a sub-
rosa system of deviation from the norms of the educated classes. Folk 
poetry came to typify and embody the gulf between the urban elite and 
the common people of the rural areas. It retained the Turks’ pre-Islamic 
and nomadic values and regenerated them in archetypal form. Written 
(or composed) by ill-educated and oft en illiterate minstrels and trouba-
dours, it had little susceptibility to or proclivity for the characteristics 
of 
Divan
poetry, which boasted of erudition. Th
e folk poet probably had 
scant sense of the Arabo-Persian fl avor of Ottoman culture; his concern 
was local and autochthonous, and for purposes of direct communication 
he used a simple vernacular immediately intelligible to his uneducated 
audiences. So the substratum of indigenous culture resisted the temp-
tation to borrow from the elite poets, who in turn were imitating their 
Persian and (occasionally) Arabic counterparts. In this sense, one could 
conceivably regard the corpus of folk poetry as a massive resistance to or 
a constant subversion of the values adopted by the Ottoman ruling class. 
It also gave voice at times to the spirit of rebellion against central author-
ity and local feudal lords.
Anatolian minstrelsy produced such major fi gures as Köroğlu, the 
stentorian heroic poet of the sixteenth century; Karacaoğlan (seventeenth 
century), who wrote lilting lyrics of love and pastoral beauty; Âşık Ömer 
and Gevherî in the eighteenth century; and Dadaloğlu, Dertli, Bayburtlu 
Zihni, Erzurumlu Emrah, and Seyrani in the nineteenth century.

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