Many people know the song "Değme Felek", but far fewer know who wrote it. The man who composed the song and first sang it is the folk poet Muammer Badem, raised in the village of İmirler in Amasya's Gümüşhacıköy district and known by his minstrel name, Âşık Özlemî. He served as an apprentice to Mahzuni Şerif, tested his saz and his verse in Bektashi-Alevi gatherings, was imprisoned after the 1980 coup, and later taught the saz to hundreds of young people while working for the municipality. He died after a traffic accident in Istanbul in 2014 and was buried in the cemetery of the village where he was born. Much of what is known about his life rests on oral accounts and press articles; because the sources diverge on several points, the contradictions are stated openly here.

A Child in the Village of İmirler

Muammer Badem was the grandson of a villager nicknamed "Çolak Hüseyin" (One-Armed Hüseyin), a veteran of the War of Independence. Çolak Hüseyin was wounded in the right arm in the war, returned to his village and spent his life farming and raising livestock in İmirler. The elder of his two sons was Hasan Badem, known as "Çolağın Hasan"; Muammer was the second of this father's four children. The fact that his mother's brother played the violin is also mentioned among the influences on the boy's musical curiosity, but little Muammer chose the saz and began playing the bağlama before he had learned to read and write. The skill of the minstrels who came and went through the village was the real source of this curiosity.

The sources diverge on his year of birth. Most biographical accounts and press articles give 1957, and a death notice that says "aged 57" fits that year. The records connected with the first journal article on Özlemî and one funeral report, however, mention the year 1951 and an age of 63. A detailed life story states that he began primary school in 1965 and middle school in 1970 and notes that he was twenty-eight when he returned from military service in 1985, all of which supports 1957. Since no civil registry document is at hand, this remains a view that carries more weight than the alternative rather than a settled fact.

According to the accounts, when Muammer was in the first grade, an inspector who had come to examine the schools heard him play the saz, listened, and took two and a half lira from his pocket and gave it to the boy. Özlemî never forgot this money and regarded the happiness of being admired and rewarded as the beginning of his persistence in music. The story is one of the familiar anecdotes in local biographies of the poet; because it rests on a single life story, its details should be read as the poet's own account.

Meeting Mahzuni Şerif and the Apprentice Years

Muammer began middle school in Gümüşhacıköy in 1970 and started appearing with his saz at school programmes, end-of-year recitals and the weddings of relatives. In the second year of middle school he is said to have worked as a waiter in a coffeehouse in the town to earn his school pocket money, never parting from his saz. At about this time Âşık Mahzuni Şerif was a guest at the house of Kemal Maraşlı, one of the town's well-known figures, in the Artıkabat neighbourhood. Maraşlı knew the young man's aptitude for music and invited him that evening. Mahzuni listened to Muammer's saz and verse and took him under his wing.

A detailed life story dates the meeting to July 1972. From then on, Mahzuni and Muammer travelled for roughly a year and a half through provinces, districts, towns and villages of Anatolia, playing and singing in the gatherings of Bektashi culture. In the minstrel tradition, knowledge is acquired less from books than from years spent beside a master; this travelling period was likewise an education conducted in the oral tradition's form of master and apprentice. Another account adds that it was at the Hacıbektaş Festival that his master gave him the pen name "Özlemî".

The wandering years disrupted his schooling. When Muammer left school for a while, Mahzuni asked his apprentice to continue his education, and Muammer went back to middle school in 1974. According to the life story, the lessons he received from his master carried him from apprenticeship to mastery, and in 1975 he wrote his first important composition, "Gidiyorum Suna Boylum Sen Ağlama". The entry of this piece into the TRT repertoire was a step in Özlemî's national recognition, and the pieces "Açma Yaramı" and "Yalan Dünya Senden Usandım" from the same period also entered the TRT repertoire. Another account lists Âşık Barani and Şekip Şahatoğlu among his first masters; because this information appears in only one place, it should be treated with caution.

Ankara, 1980 and the Prison Years

Muammer completed his high-school education in Gümüşhacıköy. Because the life story gives the same year, 1978, both for finishing middle school and for graduating from high school, these dates should be read as approximate. In the university examination he won a place at the School of Journalism and Broadcasting (Basın Yayın Yüksekokulu) in Ankara; according to Yaşar Özürküt, the school was the Journalism and Broadcasting department of Gazi University, and the year of enrolment was 1979. His student life in Ankara lasted two years and coincided with the most tense period of the student unrest. Özürküt portrays him as a young man who now and then wrote stories and poems and who also had his saz and his verse.

Soon after the coup of 12 September 1980, on the second day according to one account, on 13 September, he was arrested. The reason was that his poem "Bir Tanem" ("My Only One") had been pinned to the notice board of a left-leaning youth association. The poem is a love poem written to the girl he loved, but its lines "If you wish, my only one, this order will fall, this wheel will break, this turn of the age will stop" were read by the authorities as a political call. The association appears in the sources as the Devrimci Yol Youth Association; it is stressed insistently that Badem was not a member of it. One account says the poem was on the wall of the room where the students lived, another speaks of an association's notice board; the details of the incident have not been documented.

For the time spent in prison, the sources give figures ranging from two and a half to three years. A detailed biography says he served 28 months and was released on 5 May 1983, was conscripted on the night of his release without even being able to go home, served twenty months with the 109th Infantry Regiment in Kırklareli and was discharged in January 1985. In Özürküt's article, by contrast, Badem was included in the case of the Underground Miners' Union (Yeraltı Maden-İş), affiliated with DİSK, under Article 146 of the penal code, was tried with a demand for the death penalty, spent two years in prison, seven or eight months of it in a solitary cell, and was finally found innocent by the military court. The two accounts may be reporting different faces of the same event; the difference between them cannot be resolved without seeing the court documents.

Ümmü and the Story of "Değme Felek"

"Değme Felek", the song that carried Özlemî's name to the widest audiences, is remembered together with a story of separation. The main outline of the account in the sources is this: Muammer falls in love with his schoolmate Ümmü. The two young people meet under a tree outside the village and promise never to part. Ümmü gives him, under that tree, an embroidered handkerchief with the initial of her own name worked into it. The kind of tree varies from account to account: one says willow, one says dog rose, another does not specify. The meeting is likewise placed in the middle-school years in one source and in the high-school years in another.

According to Özürküt, the relationship remained hidden from the families until Muammer finished high school; in 1979, the year he entered university, it was made official by the exchange of a betrothal ring between the two families. The author explains this through the notion of "ikrar" (pledge) in the Alevi-Bektashi tradition: a word once given is an obligation that not even death may break. After the coup and Muammer's arrest, Ümmü's father broke the promise, saying "we will not give our daughter to a convict", and married his daughter to a civil servant. In another account, Muammer's mother, visiting her son in prison, hides from him for a long time that Ümmü has married. Muammer learns the news, according to some accounts, after leaving prison, and according to Özürküt through a friend's letter.

The second half of the story extends to Ümmü's death. Ümmü falls ill; according to Özürküt her husband sends her to her father's house, and she wishes to see Muammer one last time, but Muammer refuses to meet. After her death her relatives call him to the funeral, saying that Ümmü left a will asking to be buried under the tree where they used to meet and that only Muammer knew where the tree stood. Özlemî is that day about to appear on a broadcast. He takes his saz in his hands and sings the first words that come to his mind; these words are the song that begins "Bugün benim efkârım var, zarım var". Özürküt writes that after the broadcast Özlemî drew from his pocket a handkerchief edged with hand-made lace: the letter M in one corner, the letter Ü in the other, and in the middle a dove with a broken wing.

The sources diverge on where the broadcast took place. The account based on an article published in a newspaper speaks of a radio programme and writes that villagers who came in a minibus in front of the studio brought the news. Özürküt, for his part, places the event on a day in March 1995 when he had gone to take part in a live broadcast of Hitit TV in Çorum, and says his friends gave him the news at the bus station. In the last lines of the same article it is said that the poet was lost "exactly nine years after" Ümmü's death, in 2014; this calculation does not match the date of 1995 that the article itself gives. According to one of the accounts, Özlemî did not want to sing the song anywhere for years; at a Hacıbektaş event, listening to Sabahat Akkiraz, he remembered that the song was the one he had written, and was deeply grieved.

Although all of this is widely told among the public and in local publications, it does not rest on a court or civil registry document or on academic verification. The story should therefore be treated as an account passed on by the poet and his circle. The song itself stands on firmer ground: its words and melody belong to Özlemî and are recorded as such in many sources.

The Song and Its Verses

"Değme Felek" is also known by its first line, "Bugün Benim Efkârım Var". The song takes the form of a folk poem of three quatrains that conveys a plaintive sense of parting. Its first quatrain is as follows:

Bugün benim efkârım var, zarım var
Değme felek değme telime benim
Gül yüzlü cananı elden aldırdın
Ecel oku değdi gülüme benim

In the wording of some verses, small differences appear between the sources: the readings "gülüme", "telime" or "tenime", and the usage "aldırdın" versus "aldırdım". These differences are the natural result of a work that has circulated from mouth to mouth, and show that there is no written publication standard. In the last quatrain the poet names his own pen name: "Özlemî'yem başım dumanlı dağlar, gözlerim yaşlı da içim kan ağlar, güz ayları geldi bozuldu bağlar, hazan yeli değdi gülüme benim." That the pen name settles into the song in this way accords with the familiar custom of folk poetry.

The piece reached wide audiences through Sebahat Akkiraz's performance. Biographies say that Özlemî met Akkiraz in 1995 and that the song spread across the country from that date; because this date is repeated in the same form in several sources, it can be regarded as reliable. That it is sung at Hacıbektaş events also shows the song's place in the Alevi-Bektashi milieu. In later years it was performed by many artists.

Courses, Working Life and Other Works

After military service, Özlemî's life was spent making a living. He married in 1985; between 1985 and 1989 he worked on building sites as a cold-forge ironworker. The detailed biography notes that during the roughly ten years taken up by university, prison, military service and construction work he played and sang with his saz and his verse among friends and on special days, but that no work of his survives from these years. Starting work at the Gümüşhacıköy Municipality in 1989 brought a regular income and, with it, free time for music, and he turned to his art again.

In the same year he opened a saz course in the town. He is said to have run the course for three years and taught about six hundred students. This figure is the life story's account; since no list of students is available, it should be read as an approximate number. Even so, the course shows that Özlemî was someone who passed the tradition he received from his master on to the next generation. After 1992 he began appearing in concerts and on radio programmes. A news article also says that he trained hundreds of students.

Among his works are "Değme Felek", "Gidiyorum Suna Boylum", "Açma Yaramı", "Yalan Dünya Senden Usandım", "Ben Gülmedim", "Felek Beni Adım Adım", "Deli Gönül", "Vay Başıma Gelene Bak" and "Ömrüm Ömrüm". "Ben Gülmedim", which begins with the line "Eller güldü ben gülmedim, ömür denen uzun yolda" ("Others laughed, I did not, on the long road called life"), is one of Özlemî's other pieces on the themes of separation and fate. Because no source compiling a lyrics archive or a published discography could be found, this list should not be regarded as complete. There is also a bachelor's thesis on Özlemî (G. Uzun, Âşık Özlemi'nin Hayatı ve Eserleri, Sakarya University State Conservatory, 2011); the first journal article appeared in 2021.

Özlemî within the Minstrel Tradition

The first journal article devoted to Özlemî is Şerife Özer and Mustafa Topal's study titled "Âşıklık Geleneği ve Geleneğin Çerağlarından Amasyalı Âşık Özlemî" (Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, vol. 14, no. 34, June 2021, pp. 652-665). The article presents Özlemî as a minstrel who married and worked in the land where he grew up, built an audience in his own region and spread his fame across the country. The authors expect the study to contribute to documenting the master-apprentice relationship, weakened by the recent growth in conservatory-trained minstrels, and to the formation of a corpus of minstrels' works.

The article defines minstrels as artists who travel from land to land, go abroad, give voice to the feelings of a people longing for home, usually recite their poems in syllabic metre and play the saz extemporaneously; it examines Özlemî within this framework. Biographical sources count him among the folk poets in the line of Âşık Veysel, Mahzuni Şerif and Âşık Daimî. That he was raised in the gatherings of Bektashi-Alevi culture and received his pen name at Hacıbektaş also places him within this tradition.

The Last Journey

On 2 March 2014, at the weekend, Özlemî was seriously injured in Istanbul when a vehicle struck him as he crossed the road near Okmeydanı. After a day's struggle for his life he died on 3 March 2014. Most sources give the date of death as 3 March; one article gives 4 March, which may stem from the event and the news dates being confused. His age is 57 or 63 according to the sources; the difference appears to arise from the uncertainty over his year of birth.

His body was taken to his hometown, Gümüşhacıköy. The ceremony was held at the cemevi in the village of İmirler, with the speeches given in front of the cemevi. Besides family members, the ceremony was attended by Ozan Sinemi, president of the Anatolian Folk Poets Cultural Association, folk poets, representatives of various civil society organisations and admirers. Condolences were received by his son Ozan Can Badem, his daughter Ezgican Badem and his siblings Mukaddes, Kemal and Azmi Badem. He was buried in the family cemetery to the accompaniment of the song "Değme Felek".

On the tenth anniversary of his death, in March 2024, his admirers gathered at his grave in İmirler. At the commemoration, attended by Gümüşhacıköy Mayor Zehra Özyol, anecdotes from the poet's life were shared and works such as "Değme Felek", "Suna Boylum" and "Ben Gülmedim" were sung. In its twelfth year, in 2026, a local association also announced that it remembered him with love and respect.

His Legacy and Place in Amasya

No source has been found indicating that there is today a monument or building in Amasya bearing Özlemî's name; his grave is in the village of İmirler. Özlemî died in 2014; his legacy lives on in his songs, in the saz of the students he trained and in the annual commemorations. A newspaper article describes him as one of the last representatives of the folk-poet tradition. This assessment also shows the place he holds in Amasya's minstrel memory: a master's path happened to lead to Gümüşhacıköy, and Muammer Badem emerged from that encounter as a poet who travelled across Anatolia.

Chronology

1957 (1951 in some sources): Muammer Badem is born in the village of İmirler in Gümüşhacıköy.

1965: He starts primary school; he is said to have played the saz at an early age.

1970: He enrols at Gümüşhacıköy Middle School.

1972: He meets Âşık Mahzuni Şerif, and they travel through Anatolia together for about a year and a half.

1974: He returns to school.

1975: "Gidiyorum Suna Boylum" is composed and enters the TRT repertoire (according to the life story).

1978-1979: He finishes high school and enters the School of Journalism and Broadcasting in Ankara (dates are approximate).

1980: After the coup of 12 September he is arrested because of a poem.

1983: According to one account, he leaves prison on 5 May and is conscripted.

1985: He is discharged and marries; until 1989 he works on building sites.

1989: He begins work at the Gümüşhacıköy Municipality and opens a saz course.

1995: He meets Sebahat Akkiraz; "Değme Felek" spreads to wide audiences.

2021: Özer and Topal's first journal article devoted to Özlemî is published.

3 March 2014: He dies in Istanbul after a traffic accident.

Late March 2014: He is laid to rest after a ceremony in front of the cemevi in İmirler.

March 2024: He is commemorated at his grave on the tenth anniversary of his death.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Şerife Özer – Mustafa Topal, "Âşıklık Geleneği ve Geleneğin Çerağlarından Amasyalı Âşık Özlemî", Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, 14/34, 2021, pp. 652-665 (DergiPark).

Other sources

  • Yaşar Özürküt, "[Arada Bir] 12 Eylül ürünü bir türkü", Yeşil Gazete, 15 September 2018. yesilgazete.org
  • "Âşık Özlemi" life story (from gumushacikoylu.net), Türküler.com Ozanlarımız section. turkuler.com
  • Ali Çelik, "Âşık Özlemi'nin Biyografisi", turkubey.info, 16 December 2012; the funeral report on the same page.
  • "Âşık Özlemi son yolculuğuna uğurlandı", Haber7 (AA), 5 March 2014. haber7.com
  • "Değme Felek (Bugün Benim Efkârım Var) Türküsünün Hikâyesi", Çala Kalem, 2024. calakalem.com
  • Mustafa Aycan, "Aşık Özlemi ve Değme Felek Türküsü", BBN Haber, 7 March 2025 (from Sivas Postası).
  • "Halk Ozanı Aşık Özlemi, Ölümünün 10. Yıldönümünde Anıldı", Gümüşhacıköy Haber, 7 March 2024.
  • Âşık Özlemi, Türküler Geçidi (zerennet.net), artist page (supplementary).

Online sources