Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

Evliya Çelebi
(d. 1682)
Evliya Çelebi never ceases to amaze. His ten-volume 
Seyahatname,
 in unfurling 
the panorama of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century, defi es genres. It 
is geography and history, sociology and literature, databank and euhemerism. Its 
bland title, which simply signifi es “Book of Travels,” is an expression of humility 
from the author-narrator, who frequently refers to himself as humble, lowly, and 
poor. In its sweep and thrust, 
Seyahatname
 invites comparison with the writings 
of Strabo, Procopius, Marco Polo, and Ibn Battuta. Passages from it read like Car-
lyle and Rabelais, Pepys and Pater. In Evliya Çelebi’s sprawling saga of the Otto-
man world lies an immensely rich source of precise information as well as hearsay 
and fl ights of imagination for scholars in the Ottoman fi eld to draw on and to 
savor. One must savor it, to be sure, because this travelogue is also an engrossing 
literary work that comes close to ranking as the Ottoman prose masterpiece.
Ottoman literature produced no literary criticism except for biog-
raphies, bibliographies, and superfi cial commentaries. Referred to as 
tezkire’tüş-şuara,
these works are little more than a “Who’s Who in Otto-
man Poetry.”
6
Among the best specimens are those produced in the six-
teenth century by Sehî, Lâtifî, Âşık Çelebi, and Kınalızade Hasan. Th
e 
5. Katip Çelebi, 
Th
e Balance of Truth,
translated by Geoff rey Lewis (London: Allen 
and Unwin, 1957).
6. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s 
Geschichte der osmanischen Dichtkunst,
4 vols. 
(Pest: C. A. Hartleben, 1836–38), is a massive compilation of the biographies of about 2,200 
Turkish poets. Th
is reference book is a German version of the typical 
tezkire.

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34
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
glaring fact is that Ottoman literature from its beginnings until the second 
half of the nineteenth century functioned in a critical vacuum, aside from 
extravagant sycophantic praises or scathing satire that one fi nds—and 
immediately dismisses as worthless—in some poets’ work.
Divan
poetry was composed by and for an intellectual elite affi
liated 
mostly with the court. Most of the prominent poets received a theological 
education at a 
medrese
(Muslim academy), where instruction was given in 
Arabic and Persian, both considered a sine qua non for a man of letters. 
Th
e Ottoman poets as a rule viewed it as the epitome of literary achieve-
ment to publish a collection of poems in one of these two languages—or 
preferably in both. Fuzuli (d. 1556), ranked among the two or three great-
est classical poets, wrote three 
divan
s (collections of poems)—in Turkish, 
Arabic, and Persian.
From beginning to end, classical poetry remained under the pervasive 
infl uence of Persian and Arabic poetry: it imitated and tried to emulate the 
verse forms, rhyme-and-rhythm patterns, meters, mythology, and even 
Weltanschauung of the Persian and Arabic masters. It also adopted a sub-
stantial portion of their vocabulary.
Aruz
(Arabic: 
arud
), a quantitative prosody devised by the Arabs and 
perfected by the Persians, dominated 
Divan
poetry. Th
is metric form is 
based on the arrangement of syllables according to vowel length and con-
sonantal ending. Each short vowel at the end of a syllable accounts for a 
short sound (·). A syllable ending in a consonant or a long vowel is taken as 
a long sound (–). Th
e meter of one famous line would thus be:
Â-şık ol-dur kim kı-lar câ-nın fe-dâ câ-nâ-nı-na
– · – – / – · – – / – · – – / – · –
In this complaint by Fuzuli, that “Th
e lover is he who sacrifi ces his life to 
his loved one,” the meter as it stands is one of the most frequently used. 
Th
e name of the meter is