Heroes and Saints in Anatolian Turkish Literature

Abstract

In the comparative study of oral epic poetry Turkic epics have held a place of pride since the pioneering collections of Radlov and his successors in the 19th century.1 Epics continue to be sung and transmitted among the Turkic peoples of central Asia from northern Siberia to Turkmenistan and the Cauca sus. The celebration of Manas in modern Kyrghyzstan, of Alpamys in Uzbeki stan, or the cult of the epic of Dede Qorqut as of the mythic charters of Turkish nationalist ideology2 indicate that modern nationalism has seized the heroic epic tradition as a part of an unchanging pan-Turkic ethnic heritage. However, under this assumption it would be difficult to explain why the Turkic literatures of Central Asia have a continuing tradition of oral epic poetry, in stark contrast with the conspicuous lack of heroic epics in Anatolian Turkish lit erature besides the famous Book of Dede Qorqut and later the Korogh cycle. Out of these two one is lacking any further echo after the 16th century, and the other is a typical popular heroic-romantic narrative not attested before the 17th cen tury.3 Since Hegel's formulation of a heroic age there has been a notion that es pecially heroic epics flourish in specific socio-political conditions, that they are inflected by space and time.4 In this article I will seek to support this assumption by showing that there was a period in which Anatolian Turkish literature actu ally produced heroic narratives outside the modern rigorous delineations of the genre of heroic epics. Rather, these definitions have obfuscated the connections between such narratives, so that they have not yet been studied as a coherent group, consisting of the 'classical' heroic epics and different kinds of historical narratives.5 Moreover, I argue that the concept of man and history manifested in