Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Title: Üsküdâr’dan Amasya’da Müftî-zâde Şâ‘ir Emrî Efendi’ye: Amasya İçin
Şöyle bir gördüm Amasya şehrini rü’yâ gibi
Hâtır-ı fâtırda kaldı şekli de hülyâ gibi
Her minâre manzar-ı islâma ulviyyet-nümâ
Câ-be-câ âlî cevâmi‘ Ka‘be-i ulyâ gibi
Ben yeşillensem Yeşilırmağı’na ta‘n eyleme
Cûşiş-i dil-cû ferah-zâ seyri bak deryâ gibi
Zîr ü bâlâ bir usûl üzre dolâbın her biri
Nağme-perdâz olmada hep mutrib-i gûyâ gibi
Tahtıhe’l-enhâr zî-eşcâr vâdî dil-nişîn
Cennet-âsâdır ne İsviçre ne İspanya gibi
Siyyemâ sîb-i nefîsi yok Kızılelma’da da
Hâkinin hâsiyyet-i feyz-âveri kimyâ gibi
Şimdi bir vâlisi vardır Tal‘at-ı behcet-fezâ
Azm-i umrân-perveri şehri hemân ihyâ gibi
Kalsa Remzî anda bir müddet yazıp evsâfını
Bir eser te’lîf ederdi Asrî-i dünyâ gibi
In English
1. I saw the city of Amasya only briefly, like a dream; in my weary mind its image too has remained like a fantasy.
2. Every minaret lends loftiness to the face of Islam; its great mosques, rising here and there, are like the sublime Kaaba.
3. If I grow "green" over its Yeşilırmak, that is, if I lose my heart to it and long for it, do not reproach me; look at its charming, gladdening, surging flow, like a sea. (The poet plays on the name "Yeşilırmak", the Green River, and the verb "yeşillenmek", to turn green.)
4. Each of its water wheels, low and high, turning to the same measure and rhythm, pours out melody like a singing musician.
5. Its tree-filled valley, pleasing to the heart, beneath which rivers flow, is like paradise; neither Switzerland nor Spain resembles it. (The line can also be read: "it has no ordinary beauty like Switzerland or Spain, it is like paradise".)
6. Above all, its exquisite apple is not to be found even in Kızılelma; the abundance-bringing property of its soil is like alchemy, the elixir that turns all things to gold.
7. It now has a governor called Tal‘at, whose countenance brings joy; his resolve, devoted to prosperity, is as if bringing the city back to life. ("Tal‘at" means both "face, countenance" and is the governor's name.)
8. Had Remzî stayed there for a while, writing of its qualities, he would have composed a work like the world-renowned Asrî.
Literary and Historical Commentary
The Poet
Ahmed Remzi Akyürek (1872-1944) was one of the leading Mevlevi poets of the late period and the last sheikh of the Üsküdar Mevlevihane (Mevlevi lodge). He was born in the Kayseri Mevlevihane, the son of its sheikh Süleyman Atâullah Efendi. He studied Arabic, Persian and literature with his father and with scholars and poets of Kayseri; in 1892 he went to Istanbul and became a disciple of Celâleddin Efendi, sheikh of the Yenikapı Mevlevihane. He taught at the Kayseri İdâdîsi (secondary school); he became deputy sheikh at the Kütahya Mevlevihane, and sheikh of the Kastamonu lodge in 1909 and of the Aleppo lodge in 1913. During the First World War he went with the Mevlevi battalion to Damascus and Medina; in 1919, after the occupation of Aleppo, he returned to Istanbul and became sheikh of the Üsküdar Mevlevihane.
After the closure of the dervish lodges (1925) he worked as an official at the Hacı Selim Ağa Library in Üsküdar, where he classified the books and compiled their catalogues. The sources give different dates for his departure from the library: the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi says that he resigned on 1 February 1937 and went to Ankara, while Yakup Şafak writes that he worked at the library until 1941. He died in Kayseri on 6 November 1944 and was buried in the tomb of Seyyid Burhâneddin Tirmizî. He wrote religious and mystical poems in both aruz and syllabic metre, prepared a verse grammar and a verse dictionary for teaching Persian, and wrote and translated many treatises on Sufism. He was not a native of Amasya; his link with the city was his friendship with Ahmed Emrî Yetkin, the addressee named in the title of the ghazal, and a visit to Amasya.
Structure of the Poem
The poem is a ghazal (gazel) of eight couplets. The ghazal is a verse form in which both lines of the first couplet rhyme and, in the following couplets, only the second line keeps that rhyme; it usually runs to between five and fifteen couplets. In Remzî's ghazal the redif (refrain word) is "gibi" (like), and the rhyme is built on the sounds "-yâ / -â": rü’yâ, hülyâ, ulyâ, deryâ, gûyâ, İspanya, kimyâ, ihyâ, dünyâ. The poet's pen name (mahlas) appears in the last couplet. The source does not name the metre; the lines fit the pattern Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilün.
In the list Mehmet Arslan compiled of poems written for cities in the divans, seven city poems by Remzî appear: one each for Amasya, Ankara, Çorum, Havza and Niğde, and two for Üsküdar. This shows that Remzî often turned to the praise of cities. The Amasya ghazal is also a city eulogy, but it mixes the traditional patterns with the world of the twentieth century: beside the comparison with paradise come Switzerland and Spain, and beside the beauty of the city comes a governor busy with public works.
Meaning and Figures of Speech
The opening couplet says that the poet saw the city only for a short time: "şöyle bir gördüm" (I saw it briefly). The link drawn between dream and fantasy gives the whole poem the air of a remembrance; the poet describes Amasya not on the spot but looking back from Üsküdar. The second couplet likens the mosques to the Kaaba and mentions the loftiness the minarets lend the city. This is a simile often found in city eulogies.
The third couplet is the wittiest in the ghazal. The name Yeşilırmak forms a pun (cinas) with the verb "yeşillenmek". In everyday speech "yeşillenmek" also means to grow eager for someone or something, to set one's eye on it; when the poet says "do not reproach me if I grow green over the Yeşilırmak", he justifies his infatuation with the river by this joke. In the second half of the couplet the river's surging flow is compared to the sea.
In the fourth couplet musical terms form a congruence of images (tenasüp): "zîr" (a high note, the treble string), "usûl" (the rhythmic pattern of Turkish music), "nağme" (melody) and "mutrib" (musician). The sound the water wheels make as they turn is likened to the performance of an ensemble. The phrase "zîr ü bâlâ" means "low and high" and, through the musical sense of "zîr", is also tied to the couplet's musical imagery.
The expression "tahtıhe'l-enhâr" in the fifth couplet is taken from the Qur'anic phrase "beneath which rivers flow", used of the gardens of paradise. This quotation ties the valley of Amasya directly to the description of paradise and prepares the ground for the epithet "cennet-âsâ" (like paradise) at the end of the line. The mention of Switzerland and Spain gives to contemporary European countries the role of comparison that in classical poetry was played by distant and legendary places such as the garden of Irem or Cathay (Hıtay).
In the sixth couplet there is a double entendre (tevriye) between "sîb" (apple) and "Kızılelma" (the Red Apple). Kızılelma is the name of the distant, legendary goal longed for in Turkish tradition; by saying that the Amasya apple is not to be found even in that legendary place, the poet praises both the apple and the city. The soil being like "kimya" is an allusion to the elixir believed to turn base matter into gold. In the seventh couplet the word "Tal‘at" is again a double entendre: it means "face, countenance", and with the epithet "behcet-fezâ" (joy-increasing) gives the sense "a countenance that brings joy", while also naming the governor. In the last couplet a similar play is made on the pen name "Asrî": "Asrî-i dünyâ" can be read as "the Asrî of the age, of the world", and it also names the pen name used in his poetry by Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn, author of the Amasya Tarihi.
Places in the Poem
Mosques and minarets. The ghazal does not name a particular mosque; the second couplet mentions the city's mosques as a whole. According to a note in the commonplace book (mecmua) of Emrî, the poem's addressee, a funeral prayer was held in Amasya at the beginning of 1937 in the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, led by the Mufti Kâmil Efendi. This record, from a few months after the ghazal, shows that the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, one of the city's great mosques, was still open for worship in those years.
Yeşilırmak. The river that runs through the city. In a geographical account quoted by Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn, Amasya is described as a city built on both banks of the Yeşilırmak, also known as the "Iris".
Water wheels. The wheels of the fourth couplet are the water wheels (dolap) that raised water from the river to irrigate the vineyards and gardens. Hüsameddin writes that there were "hundreds of wheels" on the Yeşilırmak and that all the vineyards were watered by them; the old geographical works quoted in the same book also count Amasya's river and water wheels among the city's well-known features. No reliable record of the present state of these wheels could be found.
Vineyards and gardens. The tree-filled valley of the fifth couplet is the Amasya vineyards stretching along the river. According to a geographical record quoted by Hüsameddin, the city "has many vineyards, watered by the river and the wheels"; in other words, the fourth and fifth couplets describe two faces of the same landscape.
The Amasya apple. The apple of the sixth couplet is still a product identified with the city. The Amasya Misket Elması (Amasya Misket apple) received geographical indication registration as a designation of origin under number 424 on 14 March 2019; the registration covers the central district and the other districts of Amasya. The Amasya Provincial Directorate of Agriculture and Forestry cites the apple trees and apples depicted in mosaics found in the village of Yavru, in the central district, as evidence of the fruit's long history in the region.
Historical Context
The title says that the ghazal was sent from Üsküdar to "Müftî-zâde Şâ‘ir Emrî Efendi" (the poet Emrî Efendi, son of the Mufti) in Amasya. This is Ahmed Emrî Yetkin (1886-1974), son of Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi (1850-1941), mufti of Amasya. According to the commonplace book introduced by Yakup Şafak, registered under number 1645 in the Amasya Beyazıt Library, Emrî was known by the nickname "Müftizâde", met and corresponded with Remzî, and copied many of Remzî's poems into his book. The commonplace book is wrongly attributed to Remzî in the library records; Şafak shows that it belonged to Emrî.
The same commonplace book also gives the date of the ghazal. According to Şafak, the ghazal appears in it with the opening line "Şöyle bir gördüm Amasya şehrini rü’yâ gibi" and ends with the note "22 Teşrîn-i evvel sene 936 tarihli mektûbundan" (from his letter dated 22 October 1936); that is, the ghazal was sent to Emrî in a letter of Remzî's dated 22 October 1936. Elsewhere in the book Emrî noted that Ahmed Remzi Efendi, together with his son-in-law, the director of health in Çorum, came to Amasya "on Sunday 4 Teşrîn-i evvel 36", spent that evening as a guest in the house of Celâl Bey, son of the Mevlevi sheikh, went the next morning to the village of Yüzbeyi, and after returning went on to Çorum. 4 October 1936 did indeed fall on a Sunday. Read together, the two notes show that the ghazal was sent in a letter written eighteen days after this short visit; the words "şöyle bir gördüm" in the first couplet also agree with the brevity of the visit. This connection is not made explicitly in the commonplace book but is inferred from the dates of the notes.
The date also clarifies the identity of the governor in the seventh couplet. According to the list published by the Governorship of Amasya, Talat Öncel was governor of Amasya from 1935 to 1945. The words "şimdi bir vâlisi vardır Tal‘at" (it now has a governor, Tal‘at) in a ghazal written in the autumn of 1936 very probably point to Talat Öncel. Whether Remzî knew Talat Öncel, and what the public works praised in the couplet were, is unknown.
The "Asrî" of the last couplet is Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar (1869-1939), author of the Amasya Tarihi; he was alive in 1936. By saying that, had he been able to stay longer in Amasya, he would have written a work like Asrî's, Remzî pays a compliment both to the city and to its historian. There is a small difference between the text in the commonplace book and Arslan's edition: the second line of the first couplet reads "şekli de hülyâ gibi" in Arslan and "şekli bir hülyâ gibi" in the text of the commonplace book as quoted by Şafak. Arslan does not state his source for the ghazal; Hasibe Mazıoğlu's collection of Remzî's poems, Ahmet Remzi Akyürek ve Şiirleri (Ankara 1987), could not be consulted for this study.
Bibliography
Primary sources
- Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vol. 1, transliteration: Mehmet Arslan; eds. Songül Keçeci Kurt, Recep Orhan Özel, Metin Hakverdioğlu, Amasya: Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2022, e-book pp. 77, 104. amasya.gov.tr
Academic studies
- Mehmet Arslan, "Divan Edebiyatında Şehirler Üzerine Yazılan Şiirler ve Bunlar Arasında Amasya Şiirleri", Uluslararası Amasya Şairleri Bilim Şöleni Bildiriler Kitabı (4-6 Ekim 2018), eds. M. Fatih Köksal, Sibel Murad, Mevlüt İlhan, Ankara: KIBATEK, 2018, pp. 47-70; poem on pp. 57-58 (transliteration: Mehmet Arslan). amasya.bel.tr
Official sources
- Governorship of Amasya, "Görev Yapmış Valilerimiz" (Former Governors) (amasya.gov.tr).
- Amasya Provincial Directorate of Agriculture and Forestry, "Amasya Misket Elması İçin Coğrafi İşaret Tescil Belgesi Alındı" (amasya.tarimorman.gov.tr). amasya.tarimorman.gov.tr
Books
- Yakup Şafak, "Ahmed Emrî Yetkin'in Yazma Bir Mecmuası ve Bu Mecmuada Bulunan Mevlevî Şairler", Mevlâna ve Mevlevîlik Harsiyatı 1, eds. Nuri Şimşekler et al., Konya: Selçuk Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2025, pp. 753-768.
- Hasibe Mazıoğlu, "Akyürek, Ahmed Remzi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2, Istanbul 1989, pp. 304-305. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
Online sources
