Aşık Literature in Historical Context

Abstract

Aşık is a term for minstrels who performed mainly in Turkish across Ottoman and Iranian lands, especially the Balkans, Anatolia, the Caucasus, and northern Iran, beginning in the sixteenth century. 1 Scholars usually consider the aşık phenomenon in a Turkish cultural framework, but it is also useful to situate it in a Eurasian context because of the diversity of linguistic and religious communities who engaged with aşık literature and performances. Eurasia is an unwieldy concept, but useful insofar as it evokes the regions from China to Europe that had close interactions with the steppe and witnessed the expansion of large bureaucratic empires in the early modern era. This chapter positions the development of aşık literature in this historical context and offers an overview of the social character of aşık performance.