Introduction to Turkish Literature
Turkish literature and authors from Turkey: resources and guide.
Turkey is a fascinating country to study, especially when you take into account the diaspora community that emerged from the nomadic Turkic groups. I didn’t truly start realizing the scope of my interest in Turkey until I found a free Turkish course with the Yunus Emre Institute out of Washington D.C., and I was dropped into a class in which the teacher literally spoke no English and I didn’t know any Turkish. Being Persian and also taking an Arabic course at the same exact time as the Turkish course, it all slowly started to make sense. A lot of the words were the same! The grammar of Turkish was also loosely connected to Korean, which I had studied for years, and so I really began to speed ahead in the language. It also helped develop my further interests in Central Asia, where the languages were also based in Turkish. My studies in Uzbek, Azerbaijani, and Kazakh all leaped because of my Turkish knowledge.
I also had access to the literature for the first time in, well, forever. While I learned about all of the delicious foods and places to see in Ankara and Istanbul, my teacher also talked to us about Turkish television, dramas, and literature. I left the class with a rather large curiosity to learn more about the history of Turkey and its art scene. Where else in the world did we get such a unique blend of culture? Turkey, of course.
Let’s unpack everything, right here and now.
A Brief History of Turkey
The land that Turkey is now on was once called Anatolia.
Classical Anatolia is the period before the Romans conquered the region; under Achaemenid Persian control after the fall of the local kingdoms in 565 BCE, Alexander the Great ultimately would conquer the region to create the Seleucid Empire. When under the control of the Romans, Constantine I would make Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, the center of the eastern part of the empire. With the fall of the Roman Empire, this would become the center of the Byzantine Empire.
Anatolian traditional language and culture died out with the Greek conquests of the region via Hellenization. But this is where the Turk nomadic tribe comes in. It is generally agreed upon that these nomadic tribes originated in the Central Asian to the Siberian region; the first recording of these people in history comes from the Han Dynasty. Suddenly, a new leadership of the tribe emerged: the Göktürks. They began to expand West, where they settled in Anatolia, the Iranian plateau, and Eastern Europe. These were the people who built the foundations of the Ottoman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire fell in 1261.
A brief intermission is observed: the area known as Anatolia will go under Persian rule, exporting Persian culture and arts into the region, but then we see the rise of a new empire: the Ottomans. In 1326. the Ottoman capital of Bursa was established, and they marched throughout the region. The empire would conquer across borders and continents; they gained territory in Europe, Africa, and Asia, reaching their peak glory in the 1500s and 1600s. From the year 1699 onwards, the Ottoman Empire became quite unlucky. Their military campaigns and crusades were ending in massive failures, and they were beginning to lose the land they had conquered. Slowly but surely, the empire began to shrink.
The death throes of the Ottoman Empire was the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, and then the advent of WWI completely finished it off. They had entered WWI on the side of the Central Powers, the losing side, and the Ottoman Empire was broken into individual territories. This established the Republic of Turkey.
The Republic of Turkey is what Turkey is still considered today, and covers the landmass of historical Anatolia. Ottoman rule within the country officially ended in 1923, and completely new standards of religion, women’s rights, and political policy were imposed. Conflict, motivated by political coups, remains a constant in contemporary Turkish history, despite the economic situation of the country gradually increasing with time.
A Brief History of Turkish Literature
The beginning of Turkish literary history can be traced back to roughly 600 AD, where Uyghur Turk poetry can be found in classical Chinese records. Turkey is a country of oral history, especially due to the nature of the nomadic Turks. Before the introduction of Islam, it can be observed that poetry was often shamanistic in nature, performed at religious events and funerals.
There’s a deep history of folk literature and poetry in Turkish culture, but I’ll cover that in the traditional modes of storytelling section of this post. Besides that, academics often group Turkish literature as either old and modern, or pre-Islamic and post-Islamic. It is very important to note the role of the spread of Islam onto Turkish culture, especially in a literary sense; Arabic and Persian modes of storytelling blended with traditional Turkish ones, creating something entirely new.
Ottoman literature is considered to be the golden era. The vast majority of pieces written in this era were in prose or poetry formats. Persian poetic influences led to the introduction of Diwan poetry, which was highly stylized and based off of Sufi thought. They were often lyrical and utilized the ghazal format; it’s important to note that these branched off of the Persian tradition and basically created their own tradition.
Prose writing in the Ottoman era focused a lot on travel narratives, history and tradition, biographies, and political narratives. As soon as it became clear that the Ottoman Empire was dying in the early 1800s, political reform brought in radical ideas to literature along with more Western literature. Novels and short stories were not a thing in Ottoman literature until they were brought over with Turkish translations of French literature in the 1860s, and suddenly writers and authors were allowed more freedoms to create what they wished.
This sets the scene for several literary movements that create the foundations of contemporary Turkish literature, such as the New Literature Movement and the Dawn of the Future movement. That leads us to the literary landscape we now see today.
Prominent Prose Writers
Evliya Çelebi was a major Ottoman travel writer writing during the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the 1600s.
İbrahim Şinasi was a journalist, playwright, and author. He wrote one of the earliest Ottoman plays and tried to appeal to the general public, rather than specific literary circles.
Yaşar Kemal was a prominent Kurdish activist and writer; he was once considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Oğuz Atay was one of the first novelists in Turkey; he was forgotten during his lifetime.
Reşat Nuri Güntekin was a novelist and playwright active in the first half of the twentieth century.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar was a father of modernism in Turkish literature.
Aziz Nesin was a well-known satirist. He published over one hundred books during his lifetime.
Prominent Poets
Yunus Emre was a folk poet and one of the biggest figures in Turkish literary history.
Ziya Pasha was a politician and writer.
Ziya Gökalp utilized his poetry to make political statements against a larger backdrop of ongoing reform; he often advocated for nationalism of the Turkish people.
Safahat is one of the last figures of classical Turkish literary history.
Oktay Rifat was both a poet and a playwright who began writing in the 1930s.
Necip Fazıl Kısakürek was a poet, novelist, and playwright.
Traditional Modes of Storytelling
Turkey was, and still kind of is, very much of an oral history culture. This feeds into the concept of folk poetry; often, these poems tend to skewer towards the perspective that it is bad to leave behind the original nomadic lifestyle of the Turks. With the introduction of Islam, it shifted towards something more religious. However, almost all of these poems were performed orally, and many were lost with history. Theatre also was an interesting development in Turkish history; with puppets and people designated as storytellers, it would be an advent that even peasants could access in their everyday lives.
Additional Resources
Oğuzname is the only complete manuscript from the early period of Turkish history.
Read more about folk poetry in Turkey on Wikipedia.
Read more about Turkish theatre.
The Meddah is a storyteller in society.
