Orality and Performance in Late Medieval Turkish Texts: Epic Tales, Hagiographies, and Chronicles

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to look in depth at a selected part of that corpus produced within the particularly chaotic political context of late medieval Asia Minor (Anatolia), where different languages, scripts, and genres competed with one another. In search of signs of orality and references to oral performances in written texts, the essay will particularly focus on three manuscripts, all reflecting the world of the Turkish-speaking communities of the late medieval Anatolia: the Book of Dede Korkut, the Vilayetname-i Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli, and the Tarih-i Al-i Osman of Aşıkpaşazade. These manuscripts can be situated within the framework of a literary-historical genre as “epic,” “hagiography,” and “chronicle,” respectively. In the late medieval Anatolian context, these three manuscripts shared linguistic, stylistic, and discursive commonalities, while, however, fulfilling different functions for different audiences, an issue that calls attention to the pitfalls of genre analysis in historical context. As examples of the unsettled—or even, at times, chaotic—historical-ethnographic setting of late medieval Anatolia, these three texts stand as “genres-in-progress,” to crystallize only in the late sixteenth century into more structured forms. Put into the same cultural-historical framework, these texts, with their signs of orality, reflect the diverse ways in which three types of communities—tribal, religious, and political—constructed and expressed their past.