Âşık Rıza Çulha is a folk minstrel and destan singer born in 1939 in the village of Sarıyar (formerly Morami), in the central district of Amasya. He turned the violent rain, hail and flood disaster that struck Merzifon in the summer of 1959 into a destan of thirteen quatrains, which was printed in Amasya. Cavit Güzel's study of the destan tradition of the âşık (minstrel) style in Amasya counts him, together with Âşık Ahmet Abacı from the same village, among the minstrels who took part in the city's printed destan output in the mid-twentieth century. His name also appears as Âşık Rıza Çulha in lists of the region's minstrels.

How He Became a Minstrel

According to the interview Güzel held with him in 2019, Çulha took up minstrelsy under the influence of the Amasya musician Burhan Özbakır, who came to his village. Born in Amasya in 1935, Özbakır joined the Amasya Musiki Cemiyeti (Amasya Music Society) when it was revived in 1954, trained many pupils and collected the ilahis (hymns) of Amasya; his influence on the village minstrels is also mentioned in the site's article on Amasya folk songs and long songs. Çulha states that from the age of fourteen he has been voicing "the inspiration that comes from God". Güzel also records that Çulha grew up in the Alevi-Bektashi tradition and was among the minstrels who served as zâkirs in the cem ceremonies.

Yağmur, Dolu ve Sel Felaketi

Çulha's only identified printed destan is "Yağmur, Dolu ve Sel Felaketi" (The Rain, Hail and Flood Disaster) of 1959. Consisting of thirteen quatrains, the destan tells of the violent rains that fell in Merzifon that year and the disaster that followed; its subject is what happened during the calamity and the damage it caused. The destan was printed at the Oniki Haziran Press in Amasya. That Halil İbrahim Alkaç and Ahmet Abacı also had destans printed in Merzifon in the same year shows that 1959 was a busy year for the destan singers of Amasya. A natural disaster affecting the Merzifon area becoming the subject of a destan also fits Güzel's observation that itinerant destan singers chose events that moved society deeply.

Poetry

Copyright note: The poems of Âşık Rıza Çulha are under copyright protection. As no published information on the date of his death has been found, the year in which protection ends cannot be calculated. For this reason his poems cannot be published on this site as separate pages, and only two quatrains are quoted below.

Of the passages quoted by Güzel, the first quatrain of the destan and the last, in which the minstrel names himself, run as follows:

Dinleyin yine bir acı sözüm var
Bu nasıl felaket aman Allahım
Gece gündüz hep işim ahuzar
Bu nasıl felaket aman Allahım
Hep hayret ettik havadan düşen buza
Söyleyen Morami köyünden Âşık Rıza
Dinleyin bir büyük nasihat size
Bu nasıl felaket aman Allahım

The destan opens with the itinerant singer's address to his audience: the first line, beginning "Dinleyin" (Listen), makes plain that it was written to be sung in the middle of a crowd ("Listen, I have another bitter word to say... Night and day my lot is weeping and wailing"). The refrain "Bu nasıl felaket aman Allahım" (What a disaster is this, O my God) is repeated in every quatrain and carries the bewilderment of the event. In the last quatrain the minstrel, following the folk-poetry convention of the signature (mahlas), introduces himself together with the name of his village ("Söyleyen Morami köyünden Âşık Rıza", the one who speaks is Âşık Rıza of Morami village) and turns the disaster into an occasion for counsel. The word "ahuzar" in the first quatrain is the popular pronunciation of the old expression "ah u zâr", meaning weeping and wailing.

Connection with Amasya

Çulha was born in the village of Sarıyar in the central district of Amasya, introduced himself in his destan as "Âşık Rıza of Morami village", and had his identified destan printed in Amasya. Güzel writes that the destan tradition that began in Amasya with the janissary saz poets continued in the twentieth century with minstrels such as Alkaç, Abacı, Çulha and İsa Gedik. The minstrel tradition of Amasya is described more fully in the site's article on the minstrel tradition in Amasya.

State of the Sources

The information on Çulha rests on Güzel's study and on the recordings of the interview the researcher held with the minstrel on 4 September 2019. Other studies listing the region's minstrels give only his name. No published information on the period after 2020, when the study appeared, has been found. This page confines itself to information on the minstrel's literary life that appears in publicly available publications; as the full text of the destan has not been published in any collection, the quotations are taken from the passages quoted by Güzel.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

  • Rıza Çulha, Yağmur, Dolu ve Sel Felaketi, Amasya: Oniki Haziran Matbaası, 1959 (as quoted in Güzel 2020).

Online sources