Abdal Ağasızâde İsmâil Hakkı Efendi was a saz player whom Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, in his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), called "a fine bağlama poet" and named as the man who, in his own day, best knew the plaintive mani (folk quatrains) handed down from Amasya's old folk poets. Everything known about him rests on a single sentence by Hüsameddin; his dates of birth and death, his pen name and any poem of his own are absent from the sources. Even so, this brief record is one of the rare testimonies showing that in Amasya the mani and its melody lived on together, to the accompaniment of the bağlama, into the early twentieth century, carried in the memory of a particular person. That is why he is given a page of his own.

Life

No record of İsmâil Hakkı Efendi's life has been found beyond the information Hüsameddin gives. The family name "Abdal Ağasızâde" shows that he came from a family known by that name in Amasya. Hüsameddin speaks of him as someone who lived "in our time" and refers to him in the past tense ("idi", "was"). Hüsameddin was born in 1869, and the first four volumes of the Amasya Tarihi were printed between 1912 and 1928; it may therefore be supposed that İsmâil Hakkı Efendi lived between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, and that by the time the fourth volume was written he was no longer alive or had given up the saz. This dating is an estimate drawn from the wording of the text; there is no firm date.

Connection with Amasya

In the section on the Köprülü era, Hüsameddin lists the pen poets and folk poets raised by Amasya. After naming Cihâdî, Hüznî, Seyfî and Izzî among the folk poets, he mentions İsmâil Hakkı Efendi as the man who carried their mani down to his own time:

Amasya'nın halk şâirleri pek âşık, yaptıkları mânilerle ezgiler pek yanıktı. Bu yanık mâniler, zamanımıza kadar nakl u muhafaza edilmişlerdi. Bunları zamanımızda en çok bilen, güzel bağlama şâiri olan Abdal Ağasızâde İsmâil Hakkı Efendi idi.

In English: "The folk poets of Amasya were full of passion, and the mani and melodies they made were deeply plaintive. These plaintive mani had been handed down by word of mouth and preserved until our time. In our time the one who knew them best was Abdal Ağasızâde İsmâil Hakkı Efendi, a fine bağlama poet." Hüsameddin does not state separately where he came from, but he places the record within Amasya's own tradition of folk poetry and presents the man as one of the last living bearers of that tradition. In this respect his connection with Amasya is clear; his birthplace, however, is not given.

Poetry

No poem, mani or türkü of İsmâil Hakkı Efendi's own has been found. Hüsameddin quotes nothing from him and records no pen name. His description of him as a "bağlama poet" suggests a folk artist who both played and sang the words of others on his saz and composed words of his own; but which mani were his and which he learned from the older poets is unknown. The mani of Cihâdî, Hüznî, Seyfî and Izzî, whom Hüsameddin names, were never written down either, and this oral heritage was largely lost along with those who knew it. What survives today is the single testimony that he was its keeper.

The real value of the record is that it shows the mani and the melody living together in Amasya to the sound of the bağlama. This line, running from the janissary minstrels to the âşıks of the twentieth century, is treated more broadly on this site in the articles on Amasya folk songs and long songs and on the minstrel tradition in Amasya. The life of Cihâdî Ahmed Ağa, one of the folk poets Hüsameddin lists, is told in a separate article.

Family and Circle

Hüsameddin's biographical volumes mention one more person bearing the same family name. In the life of Hammaloğlu Abdülkâdir Efendi, one of the muezzins of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, we read that he was appointed chief muezzin in 1297 (1880) on the death of "the chief muezzin Abdal Ağasızâde Hâfız İbrâhim Efendi". It would not be surprising for a muezzin known for his voice and a folk poet known for his bağlama to come from the same family, but Hüsameddin draws no kinship between the two. This link is only a possibility resting on the shared family name.

State of the Sources

İsmâil Hakkı Efendi is a single-source figure. His name appears only in the fourth volume of Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi; no entry devoted to him has been found in the other volumes we searched, in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi or in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü (Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature). Nor does his name appear in recent studies listing the âşıks of the region. His dates of birth and death, the quarter he lived in, his occupation and his poems therefore remain unknown. The information on this page amounts to Hüsameddin's sentence; the dating and the family link, as noted above, are our own inferences.

Bibliography

Online sources