Berkî is the poet represented by a single semâî in a manuscript verse notebook compiled in Merzifon, the Merzifon Cönkü introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019. His name must be given here with reservation: Hakverdioğlu writes the pen name as "Berkî(?)", with a question mark, meaning that the reading in the manuscript is not certain. Who the poet was, and where and when he lived, are unknown. There is a poet from Amasya bearing the same pen name, Yeniçerizâde Berkî Hasan Çelebi, whose biography appears in Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi; but no record shows that the poem in the cönk belongs to him. This page sets out plainly the uncertainty about the reading and the identity, and publishes the surviving couplet of the poem on its own page.

Life

There is no information about the life of the Berkî of the cönk. In the list giving the poets of the cönk and the number of their poems, Hakverdioğlu's article says "Berkî(?) 1 aruz", and in the poems section it quotes the first couplet of the semâî from page 55 of the cönk. It gives no further explanation. That the poem is a semâî written in aruz suggests that the poet knew aruz and had some connection with the saz milieu; Hakverdioğlu also notes that most of the aruz poems in the cönk belong to folk poets. Beyond this general observation nothing can be said about the poet's character.

The Merzifon Cönkü and the Connection with Amasya

The Merzifon Cönkü is a 112-page notebook in ta'lik script, which Hakverdioğlu acquired from a second-hand bookseller and which, according to the bookseller, came from Merzifon. It contains 161 poems by thirty-two poets; alongside nineteenth-century minstrels such as Tokatlı Nûrî, Erzurumlu Emrah, Dertli and Âşık Ömer, there are also ghazals by the sixteenth-century poet Bâkî. Hakverdioğlu estimates that the notebook is about a hundred years old and thinks that it was compiled within the literary circle of Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon, most probably by a poet named Fethî. Berkî's only known connection with Amasya is that his semâî entered this Merzifon collection. This shows that the poem was recited in Merzifon; it does not show that the poet was from Merzifon or Amasya.

The State of the Sources and the Question of Identity

The Uncertain Reading

The question mark Hakverdioğlu placed beside the pen name shows that the name cannot be read clearly in the manuscript. In the old script the word "Berkî" may resemble other pen names if a few dots or letter teeth are read differently. Since the article gives only the page number in the cönk as the reference for the poem, the reading can be checked today only by seeing the cönk itself. On this page the pen name is given in the article's reading, together with its reservation.

Berkî Hasan Çelebi of Amasya

In the seventh volume of Amasya Tarihi, Hüsameddin gives a short biography of Yeniçerizâde Berkî Hasan Çelebi:

Berkî Hasan Çelebi-Yeniçerizâde Amasyalıdır. Yeniçerioğlu Osmân Bey bin Paşa Hüseyin Ağa'nın oğludur. Pederi züamâdan olup kendisi Müderris Abdî Efendi'den edebiyât öğrendi. Amasya beytülmâl kâtibi, ba'dehû Serdârzâde Halîl Paşa'nın dîvan kâtibi oldu. Bunun irtihâlinde Amasya sancağı dîvân efendisi olup 1099 kargaşalığında vefât etdi. Kâtib, şâir, mûsikîşinâs olup güzel sâz ve ûd çalar, meclis-i ârâ yaşardı.

In English: "Yeniçerizâde Berkî Hasan Çelebi is from Amasya. He is the son of Yeniçerioğlu Osman Bey, son of Paşa Hüseyin Ağa. His father was one of the holders of zeamet fiefs; he himself learned literature from the professor Abdî Efendi. He became clerk of the Amasya treasury of escheats, then divan secretary of Serdârzâde Halil Pasha. On the pasha's death he became divan efendi of the sanjak of Amasya, and he died in the disturbances of 1099 (1687-88). He was a clerk, a poet and a musician; he played the saz and the oud beautifully and lived as the ornament of gatherings." Berkî Hasan Çelebi was a pupil of the Amasya biographer of poets Abdî Efendi, and this circle is described in the site's article on Abdî Efendi's biographical anthology.

That Hasan Çelebi was both a poet and a musician who played the saz and the oud is a striking match for the fact that the poem in the cönk is a semâî, a form well suited to being sung. On the other hand, there is not enough ground to identify the two. Hüsameddin gives no example of Hasan Çelebi's poems; the cönk was compiled about two hundred years after him, and the semâî is a form much used by nineteenth-century saz poets as well. That even the reading of the pen name is uncertain weakens this identification further. The two Berkîs are therefore treated here as separate persons, and the relationship between them is left as an open question.

Other Berkîs

The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü (Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature) includes a sixteenth-century divan poet with the pen name Berkî. This poet, whose life is unknown, has a ghazal recorded with the words "Berkî Bey" in a poetry miscellany in the Süleymaniye Library. No link has been established between that ghazal and the semâî in the cönk. It appears that the pen name was used by more than one poet.

Poetry

The only poem recorded under Berkî's name in the cönk is a semâî. The semâî is a form sung in the aruz pattern "mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün" and known in saz poetry for its melody. The article gives only the first couplet of the poem: an opening couplet in the tone of counsel, urging the heart to be wise and graceful amid the troubles of the world. The reading of the first word of the second line is also unclear. The rest of the poem is in the cönk itself and has not been published. The couplet is given with its original text, an English rendering and a commentary on the separate page "Semâî 1: Göňül bu derd-i ‘âlemde zekâvet olmamız yegdir" in this category.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

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