The Book of Dede Korkut: A Turkish Epic

By Faruk Sümer, Ahmet E. Uysal and Warren S. Walker

“The Book of Dede Korkut has been called the Iliad of the Turks . . . An excellent translation in English . . . Smooth, highly readable, enlightening.” —Books Abroad
 
One of the oldest surviving pieces of Turkish literature, The Book of Dede Korkut can be traced to tenth-century origins. Now considered the national epic of Turkey, it is the heritage of the ancient Oghuz Turks and was composed as they migrated westward from their homeland in Central Asia to the Middle East, eventually to settle in Anatolia. Who its primary creator was no one knows, the titular bard, Dede Korkut, being more a symbol of Turkish minstrelsy than a verifiable author. The songs and tales of countless minstrels lay behind The Book of Dede Korkut, and in its oral form the epic was undoubtedly subject to frequent improvisation by individual performers. Partly in prose, partly in verse, these legends were sung or chanted in the courts and camps of political and military leaders. Even after they had been recorded in written form, they remained part of an oral tradition.
 
The present edition is the first complete text in English. The translators provide an excellent introduction to the language and background of the legends as well as a history of Dede Korkut scholarship. These outstanding tales will be of interest to all students of world mythology and folklore.
 
“A masterwork of [tenth-century] Turkish literature—and perhaps as one of the world’s most impressive national epics . . . with its action-packed narrative in prose and verse, [it] unfurls a fascinating panorama of Turkish tribal and feudal life—warfare, hunts, festivities, plunders, preternatural phenomena, heroics and love.” —Middle East Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780292758346

Book preview

THIS BOOK IS PUBLISHED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE DAN DANCIGER PUBLICATION FUND

The Book of Dede Korkut

A TURKISH EPIC

Translated into English and Edited by

FARUK SÜMER

AHMET E. UYSAL

WARREN S. WALKER

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright © 1972 by Faruk Sümer, Ahmet E. Uysal, and Warren S. Walker

All rights reserved

First Paperback Printing, 1991

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kitab-i Dede Korkut. English.

   The book of Dede Korkut.

   Bibliography: p.

   I. Sümer, Faruk, ed. II. Uysal, Ahmet E., ed. III. Walker, Warren S., ed. IV. Title.

PL248.K5E57         398.2′2′0958         72-3214

ISBN 0-292-70787-8

ISBN 978-0-292-75833-9 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-0-292-75834-6 (individual e-book)

DOI 10.7560/715011

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Prologue

LEGEND I: The Story of Bugach Khan, Son of Dirse Khan

LEGEND II: The Sack of the House of Salur Kazan

LEGEND III: The Story of Bamsi Beyrek, Son of Kam Büre

LEGEND IV: The Story of the Capture of Uruz Bey, Son of Kazan Bey

LEGEND V: The Story of Delü Dumrul, Son of Duha Koja

LEGEND VI: The Story of Kan Turali, Son of Kanli Koja

LEGEND VII: The Story of Yigenek, Son of Kazilik Koja

LEGEND VIII: The Story of Basat, Killer of the One-Eyed Giant

LEGEND IX: The Story of Emren, Son of Begil

LEGEND X: The Story of Seghrek, Son of Ushun Koja

LEGEND XI: The Story of Salur Kazan’s Captivity and His Rescue by His Son Uruz

LEGEND XII: The Story of the Revolt of the Outer Oghuz against the Inner Oghuz and of the Death of Beyrek

Notes

Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Avshar women in traditional dress

2. Caravan of Avshars

3. Avshar storyteller

4. Traditional Turkish tent

5. Sword-dance team

6. Medieval miniature showing Dede Korkut

MAP

The Two Worlds of Dede Korkut: The Middle East and Central Asia

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our thanks are extended to the many friends and colleagues who assisted us, in various ways, with this study during the past eight years. In particular, we wish to thank Professor Ahmet Temir, chairman of the Turkish Cultural Research Institution; Jahit Öztelli, director of the Turkish National Folklore Institute; Professors Teki Velidi Togan of Istanbul University and Talat Tekin of the University of California, Berkeley; Orhan Shaik Gökyay and Muharrem Ergin, Turkey’s most distinguished Dede Korkut scholars; and Barbara K. Walker, writer and folklorist.

We wish to express our appreciation to the rector and faculty of Ankara University for the use of the facilities of that institution, and to the president and Board of Regents of Texas Tech University for research grants during 1969 and 1970.

F. S.

A. E. U.

W. S. W.

INTRODUCTION

The Book of Dede Korkut is an epic of the Oghuz, one of the major branches of the Turkish peoples. Better known as Turkomans, the name they acquired after their conversion to Islam, the Oghuz migrated farther west than most of the Turkish tribes to become eventually the Turks of Turkey. Both the Seljuks and the Ottomans were descendants of the Oghuz, as were the interim Ak-Koyunlu and Kara-Koyunlu dynasties. Their epic, presented here in English for the first time, constitutes one of the most important literary and historical documents from the world of the Middle Ages.

That a book so significant should appear in English only at this late date cannot be attributed either to oversight or to neglect but rather to a set of circumstances peculiar to the work itself. The epic was long lost, even to the Turks themselves, and its restoration has been fraught with numerous and perplexing problems of language and history. Not all of these cruxes have been resolved satisfactorily, but scholarship on the subject has finally reached a vantage point from which the work as a whole can be viewed quite clearly. We know now, with reasonable certainty, when and where this epic was composed, how it was transmitted, who some of its dramatis personae were, and from what cultural milieu it emerged.

The Book of Dede Korkut comprises a Prologue and twelve legends told largely in prose in the extant texts but enriched by frequent passages of verse. Apparently independent stories at one time, the legends are not arranged sequentially in chronological order and are not structurally unified. Their unity derives instead from elements, substantive and stylistic, which they have in common. From beginning to end they sing the praises of the Oghuz people, their nomadic way of life, their customs, and their values. All of the protagonists are Oghuz, and all of the action is seen from their point of view. As with other heroic literature, these stories are action-centered, most of them revolving around hunting expeditions, battles with the infidels and among the Oghuz themselves, pursuit, captivity, escape, and revenge. The twelve units share the same cast of characters, one of whom is the purported author himself, Dede Korkut. Many stylized expressions—salutations, epithets, descriptive phrases, and figures of speech—recur throughout the epic with such regularity that they help maintain a consistency of tone. And at the end of each episode, the narrator makes an apostrophe to and offers a prayer for the sovereign (my khan) before whom the legend was supposedly recited. Strange and incredible when we first approach it, the world of this epic is thus so convincingly rendered that our disbelief is gradually suspended for a poetic faith in its reality.

The Setting: Time and Place

The story begins in the section of Central Asia that was the homeland of the Oghuz tribes between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Once members of the ancient Göktürk Empire, the Oghuz moved westward in the ninth century to settle along the banks of the Syr Darya River and established there, by the tenth century, a state of their own. Their territory extended along both banks of the Syr Darya (the Jaxartes of classical times), then westward to the shores of the Caspian, south to Transoxiana, and northward to the steppes beyond the Aral Sea. Although a majority of their people was to remain nomadic for centuries to come, a sufficient number became sedentary—yatuk, or lazy, they were called by their errant kinsmen—founding such cities as Karachuk, Saghnak, Jand, Huwasa, and Yeni Kent. Most of this original land of the Oghuz lay in what are now the Kazak, Uzbek, and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics. (See map facing p. ix.)

Whatever events in the epic are actually historical occurred in this area, probably in the Syr Darya basin and probably in the tenth or eleventh century. Several place names in the legends point to this region, and, more important, the heroes’ way of life reflects the cultural pattern of the Oghuz in that time and place. Numerous early historical works on the Middle East and Central Asia refer to characters and incidents one finds in The Book of Dede Korkut and vouch for the historicity of some parts of that work.

The principal enemies of the Oghuz during the eleventh century were the Kipchak Turks to the north, and the infidels with whom the heroes of the epic fought were undoubtedly among these ancestors of the Golden Horde. The Kipchaks at this time still practiced a shamanistic type of religion common among many Turkish, Tartar, and Mongol peoples. The Oghuz tribes themselves first came into contact with Islam during the tenth century as a result of close trade relations with the Moslems of Transoxiana under the Samani Dynasty. By the end of the eleventh century the masses of Oghuz had been converted, superficially at least, and had become the defenders of the new faith.¹ In its earliest form, now lost, The Book of Dede Korkut almost certainly contained descriptions of the Kipchaks and accounts of the deeds of their leaders; in the sixteenth-century version, of which there are two manuscripts extant, only a few traces of the Kipchaks remain. (These are commented upon in the Notes.)

If they held their own against the Kipchaks for four centuries, the Oghuz were forced to give ground in the thirteenth century before a new force that appeared out of the east, the Mongols. Actually, there were relatively few Oghuz left along the Syr Darya by the time the armies of Genghis Khan arrived there, for the bulk of the population had migrated westward into Iran, Azerbaijan, and Asia Minor, or Anatolia. From their ranks the Kinik tribe had risen to prominence to found the Seljuk dynasty, which, in turn, opened the gateway west for all the other twenty-three tribes of Oghuz, now known generally as Turkomans. By the time the first version of The Book of Dede Korkut was recorded, the defense of the old homeland along the Syr Darya was already half forgotten—a memory, increasingly vague, that began to acquire the aura of legend. It was a favorite subject for the songs of Turkish minstrels, and the frequent authorial intrusions to explain customs and values that prevailed in the days of the Oghuz may well have been present even in this early text.

The first report of a manuscript containing The Book of Dede Korkut was made by Ebu Bekr Ibn Devadari.² It did not then have this title but was referred to by a generic label, Oghuz Namah, which is translated, variously, as Oghuz Book or Oghuz Document or Oghuz Legend. There were numerous Oghuz Namahs in circulation at this time, collector’s items of a kind comparable to Greek and Roman manuscripts during the Renaissance in Italy, and some of these are still preserved in libraries in Istanbul. Although the Dede Korkut namah read and summarized in part by Devadari did not survive, knowledge of its existence provides invaluable information about the epic, particularly about its date of composition. Since Devadari died in 1332, this date is the terminus ad quem for the recording of the first known edition. His history of the Middle East, Durer ut-tijan ve gurer ut-tevarih ilezman, in which the Oghuz Namah is described, required considerable time for Devadari to write, and thus it seems likely that the namah itself dates from no later than the first quarter of the fourteenth century, possibly a few years earlier. It is not known where this first redaction of minstrel songs was made, though a hypothesis can be advanced. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, most of the lands where the Turkomans lived were incorporated in the Mongol Ilhan State, ruled over by the descendants of Genghis Khan and tributary to the Great Khan in eastern Asia. Although the Ilhan State extended from the Oxus River to the western part of Anatolia, its center of gravity lay in extreme eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan. There in the courts of such Ilhan rulers as Gazan (1295–1304) and Uljaytu (1304–1316) a revival of old Mongol and old Oghuz traditions was encouraged,³ and there perhaps was the most likely milieu in that turbulent era for a major literary work to take shape.

Between the time of composition of this early text and that of the texts on which all modern editions are based, two and a half centuries elapsed. By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the Turkomans had been living so long in Anatolia that they supposed it to have been the homeland of their Oghuz ancestors. Thus the second known edition of The Book of Dede Korkut is set in Anatolia and neighboring Azerbaijan, and the enemies of the Oghuz are no longer represented as Kipchaks but as the Georgians and other Christians along the Black Sea. These infidels had fought against the Turks for many generations, and it seemed as if they must always have been their foes. The work now acquires an additional dimension of retrospect, for upon the distant memories of Central Asia are superimposed more recent recollections of the Middle East. Oghuz flocks still graze along identifiable streams in the Syr Darya region, and the heroes still bear names rarely seen in manuscripts of later date than the eleventh century; but when the heroes go into battle, they strike against such cities as Trebizond (Trabzon), held by the Byzantines until 1461, and lay siege to such redoubtable fortresses as Tatyan Castle, a Georgian citadel near the Black Sea. Again the redactor remains unidentified and the site of his artistic labors uncertain, although linguistic evidence clearly points toward Erzurum.⁴

The Characters, Historical and Legendary

So much of The Book of Dede Korkut has a ring of authenticity that some readers conclude that the entire work is historical, even to the extent of euhemerizing the patently mythological figures in its cast of characters. Yet nowhere in the book is there any indication that the Oghuz participated in even one of the major historical events of their time. No reference is made in any of its episodes, for example, to the well-known involvement of the Oghuz in the affairs of the Ghaznavid Dynasty, to their contribution to its eclipse in 1043 at the Battle of Dandarquan, or to the consequent opening of their way west into Khurasan. Nor is there any mention whatever of the successive stages by which the Seljuks, of Oghuz origin, conquered Iran and most of Anatolia to found their empire during the remainder of the eleventh century. Like most epics, then, The Book of Dede Korkut is a work whose main action is largely fiction, but so well do the legends reflect the pattern of early Oghuz life that they must also be considered documents of social and cultural history.

The Oghuz Turks comprised a confederation of twenty-four tribes divided into two main branches, the Boz (Gray) Ok (Arrows) and the Üch (Three) Ok (Arrows).

In the epic the Boz Ok are called the Tash (Outer) Oghuz, and the Üch Ok, Ich (Inner) Oghuz. Each of the twenty-four tribes had its own territory (yurt) and was ruled by a bey, or lord;⁶ each branch was administered by a superior bey, with the advice of a representative council; and the activities of the whole confederation were coordinated by a joint council, or divan, presided over by the bey of beys, or beylerbey, a title in use throughout the Ottoman era. The beylerbey stood immediately beneath the sultan, khan, or king, a combination of military commander and the grand vizier of later times. Atlhough the two branches are mentioned frequently in The Book of Dede Korkut and although the heroes are often identified with one or the other, the distinction between Outer and Inner Oghuz is not especially significant until the last legend, in which the two are involved in a civil war. Even here, however, there are no real differences, ideologically or culturally, between the two branches; the conflict originates over a point of pure punctilio.

The Oghuz tribes numbered several hundred thousand souls, but in the legends we seldom sense the presence of these masses. Like most heroic literature, The Book of Dede Korkut has an aristocratic orientation; it is a work devoted to deeds of lords and ladies. The only commoner to break the social barrier and assume a distinctly prominent role in the action is Karajuk, the shepherd of Legend II. So great are his valor and loyalty that his master, Kazan, is at last forced to accept him as a comrade-in-arms. Otherwise the cast is drawn almost entirely from the ranks of the bey class, nearly eighty of whom appear on the Oghuz epic stage.⁷

In the epic the king of the Oghuz, aggrandized with the epithet Khan of Khans, is Bayindir Khan, and between him and the beys who attend his council, or divan, there exists a comitatus relationship. Bayindir Khan is the final authority for all group action, the supreme judge in all decisions that will affect the Oghuz nation. To him the beys owe allegiance; to him they pay their respects at regular intervals; to him they deliver their booty and spoils of war. He, in turn, is their protector, powerful, wise, and benevolent. Periodically, he invites them to sumptuous banquets, formal state dinners, at which he distributes among them the wealth of the Oghuz, usually in the form of gifts to the individual beys.

Despite his political preeminence Bayindir Khan is not a man of action and hence not the chief protagonist of the epic. Just as Higelac is outshone by Beowulf, and Charlemagne by Roland, so Bayindir Khan seems pale beside his son-in-law and beylerbey, Salur Kazan.⁸ Military leader of the Oghuz, their doughtiest fighter, and the inspiration of their warriors, Kazan dominates the action of the entire epic. Four of the legends (II, IV, XI, XII) are devoted to him and the members of his immediate family, and his influence is felt in most of the other episodes as well. A member of the Salur tribe, he belongs to the Inner Oghuz branch, but, as beylerbey, he has jurisdiction over both Inner and Outer Oghuz, and he convenes their leaders at times of crisis. Once a year he entertains all the beys at a plunder feast, an institution peculiarly adapted to the temper of heroic society.⁹ At the end of an annual banquet, Kazan removes his family to safety and then invites the beys to plunder his tent, the latter taking from his household possessions whatever articles they desire. On one occasion he makes the mistake of inviting only the beys of the Inner Oghuz to share in the annual largesse, and the Outer Oghuz, understandably offended, revolt. There is no attempt made to explain or rationalize Kazan’s exclusion of the Outer Oghuz, though it is incredible that so competent a leader through eleven legends should commit such an egregious administrative error in the twelfth. Obviously, it is an artistic device, quite apart from the psychology of character, to bring about the internecine strife and thus set the tragic tone for the Götterdämmerung of the epic.

Of all the heroes in The Book of Dede Korkut, Kazan seems to be the one most readily identifiable as a historical personage. His name occurs frequently in the early sources of information about the Oghuz, the works of Yazijioghlu, Haji Bektash-i Veli, Bayburt Osman, and Ebul Gazi Bahadir Khan.¹⁰ Certainly he is the very epitome of Oghuz manhood and valor, the pole of Turkestan . . . the hope of the poor, the support of warriors in distress. Yet for all his seeming reality, he remains partly a mythical figure. The historians of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries who wrote of the Oghuz were heavily indebted for their material to the Turkish oral tradition, and by their time numerous tales about the exploits of Salur Kazan were already in circulation. From folklore sources come also the supernatural elements in the legends about Kazan: the remarkable accuracy of his prophetic dream of disaster and his talking to the forces of Nature in Legend II; later, in Legend XI, his reported slaying of the seven-headed dragon that dropped from the sky, his forcing back into the earth, whence it came, a skewer-laden demon, and his containing with his sturdy legs an avalanche loosed on the Oghuz people by their enemy.

Of only slightly lower stature as a folk hero is Bamsi Beyrek with the Gray Horse, protagonist of the longest and most moving of the legends (III) in the epic. After fifteen years of captivity in an infidel dungeon, Beyrek effects his escape and arrives home, wearing sackcloth, on the very day that his betrothed is to be wed, against her will, to a dastardly suitor. Although Beyrek may represent the flower of Oghuz chivalry, he belongs to all ages and all peoples, his courtship, his long absence from home, and his ultimate success forming a pattern familiar to students of comparative folklore.¹¹ The Beyrek story is preserved in many folktales still current in the oral tradition in Turkey.¹² His murder at the council of Uruz Koja confirms the treachery of the Outer Oghuz leaders and precipitates the civil war of the last legend.

Along with Kazan, Beyrek, and other culturally credible folk heroes are some totally imaginary creatures from the world of the masal, the Turkish Märchen. In Legend V Delü Dumrul struggles with Azrail, the Moslem Angel of Death. In Legend VIII a man-eating, one-eyed giant named Tepegöz oppresses the Oghuz nation, killing and wounding many of its beys. He himself is eventually killed by Basat, a superman who had been suckled by a lioness and reared with her cubs. Regardless of their sources, often the subject of controversy, these supernatural beings have analogues in classical mythologies.

Although the heroic world is a man’s world, women are not absent from The Book of Dede Korkut, nor are they relegated to a greatly inferior position. Turkish women originally had almost equal status with men, the veil, the harem, and polygamy¹³ being Arabian institutions imported some time after the adoption of Islam. In the legends women are revered as mothers, loved and respected as wives. They are often good counselors to their husbands. Dirse Khan (II) and Begil (IX) survive periods of crisis because they follow the sage advice of their wives. Reared in the hardships of nomadic life, Oghuz women come naturally by Amazonian attributes. Of the twenty-four women in the epic, three—Banu Chichek (III), Burla Hatun (IV), and Seljen Hatun (VI)—engage successfully in physical combat against male antagonists.

Least colorful of all the actors, human and superhuman, on the epic stage are the infidel enemies of the Oghuz. Shökli Melik, Bugajik Melik, Kara Arslan Melik, Demir Yayla Kipchak Melik, Sunu Sandal Melik, Ak Melik Cheshme, Arshin Oghlu Direk Tekür, and Kara Tekür never come alive as characters but remain mere puppets. We are told that they lead attacks against the Oghuz beys, imprison them in castle dungeons, commit atrocities against their people, and eventually meet the deaths they have so

Reviews for The Book of Dede Korkut

[cglanovsky · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When I read this book the most prominent tags associated with it were ( and maybe still are) "Central Asia" and "Turkey" or "Turkish". Isn't that odd just at face value? How can it be from Turkey (a country with territory in continental Europe) and from the MIDDLE of Asia?Well, it can because The Book of Dede Korkut is essentially the transcription of an oral tradition developed by the Orghuz people as they migrated out of Central Asia (roughly modern day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan) ultimately ending up in Anatolia (modern day Turkey). Now, the Orghuz Turks did go on to conquer all of Anatolia and even toppled the Byzantine Empire replacing it with the Ottoman Empire, but that conquest takes place after the scope of these stories. Toward the end of the stories the city of Trebizond (Modern Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of Turkey) is still "infidel" and lies at the edge of Orghuz territory. This just goes to show that at the time these stories originated their authors had barely begun to establish a foothold in the territory we now call Turkey.Just because these stories predate a Turkish "Turkey" does not mean the stories don't deserve a "Turkey" designation in the most common tags. The Book of Dede Korkut is essentially the origin story for many of the modern nations primarily speaking Turkic languages, Turkey among them. So I have no issue with this book being associated with Turkey and Central Asia, but rather with its NOT being associated with Azerbaijan or the Caucasus region in general, most likely the epicenter of most of action. This region represents the halfway point between their starting point in Central Asia and their end point in Anatolia. Indeed, of all the countries that do so, Azerbaijan seems to reverence Dede Korkut most of all today and there seems to be reason to believe that the text itself is most closely related to Azeri Turkish, perhaps suggesting that it was in Azerbaijan that it was first set down in writing. The fault for the misattribution is probably due to the misleading subtitle "A Turkish Epic". "Turkish" is the demonym for a person from Turkey, but it could also mean any group speaking a Turkic language from a huge swathe of Asia running diagonally from northeastern Russia (the Yakuts) through China (the Uyghurs) and ending in Turkey. Again, these stories form a backdrop for the later conquest of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of the Ottoman Dynasty and its successor modern Turkey, and Turkey IS the most visible representative of that language family on the global stage. However, to say that Turkey's ubiquity earns it the strongest right to claim these stories would be like calling Shakespeare American. The stories themselves are interesting. They contain the kind of repetitive language common in epic poetry that began in the oral tradition (think of the Odyssey and how often you have to read the words "wine-dark sea") and it's clear that the stories developed over time in that they lack an overarching development. These aren't inherently flaws any more than "there were lots of robots" would be a flaw in a Science Fiction novel; if robots bother you, maybe Science Fiction isn't your thing. Compared to other ancient or medieval literature I've read, I'd call it about average. I'd compare it to The Mabinogion in a lot of ways but a little more fast-paced and a lot less fantastical in content. The titular Dede Korkut is actually interesting as an extremely peripheral character, a kind of bard, who makes very brief appearances in each of the stories.

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting as being Turkish herotales largely independent of later Osmanli history