Dertli, whose real name was İbrâhim, was a nineteenth-century minstrel poet born in 1772 in the village of Şahnalar in the Çağa district of Bolu. Together with Erzurumlu Emrah and Seyrânî he is counted among the best-known aşıks of his century. His link with Amasya comes from two sources: according to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi article, in the years he wandered through Anatolia he took part in the minstrels' gatherings of Amasya as well as those of Sivas, Ankara and Çankırı, playing the saz and reciting poems there. The second link is the Merzifon Cönkü: seven poems are recorded under the name Dertli in this manuscript poetry notebook introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019, and Hakverdioğlu counts him among the great minstrels who stopped in Merzifon.

There is no document telling when or for how long Dertli stayed in Amasya; the link consists in Amasya being among the stopping places of a wandering minstrel. The poems in the cönk, on the other hand, show that his words were read and written down in nineteenth-century Merzifon.

Life

According to the TDV article his father was Ali Ağa of the Karahüseyinoğulları. He spent his childhood as a shepherd, and when after his father's death the district notable Halil Ağa seized his fields by force, he left his village. He stayed for a while with a relative in the village of Deveciler, then went to Istanbul, but had to return because the state did not allow people from Anatolia to settle in the city. In Konya he served three years as apprentice to a coffeehouse keeper named Hacı Âsım, then went to Egypt and lived there for ten years. During these years he both worked and frequented minstrels' coffeehouses and dervish lodges. He returned to his village, married and had two sons, but unable to adapt to a settled life he left his family in the village and set out again.

The journeys on which he attended the gatherings of Amasya belong to this period. Going to Istanbul again in 1825, Dertli won fame playing the saz in the minstrels' coffeehouses of Beşiktaş, Tahtakale and Tavukpazarı and came to be regarded as a master for his fine voice and his skill at solving riddles. He attached himself to Hüsrev Paşa, former governor of Bolu, and became his keeper of candlesticks; when his kaside (qasida) with the refrain "fes", praising Mahmud II's fez reform, won the favour of the palace, he was appointed notable of Çağa. Because of his fondness for drink and his embezzling part of the taxes he collected, he was soon dismissed and lost everything. According to TDV he attempted suicide at Gölpazarı in 1840 and after this event gave up the pen name Lutfî, which he had used until then, and took the pen name Dertli. In his last years he came under the protection first of Hüsnü Efendi, treasurer of Bolu, and then of Alişan Bey, a notable of Ankara, and he died in Alişan Bey's mansion in Ankara. The year of his death is given variously in the sources as 1845, 1846 and 1848; his grave is in the village of Şahnalar in Yeniçağa.

Hakverdioğlu writes that Merzifon was a staging post on the roads to Çorum, Kastamonu, Sinop and Samsun, that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries poets were obliged to stop there, and that names such as Dertli, Erzurumlu Emrah, Tokatlı Nûrî and Âşık Ömer accepted the invitation of Merzifon poets like Eyüp Sabrî. This sentence cannot be taken literally for Dertli. Eyüb Sabrî was born in 1843 and died in 1866, whereas Dertli died in 1848 at the latest. A meeting of the two poets in one gathering therefore seems impossible. Hakverdioğlu's sentence should be read as a general assessment describing Merzifon as a town that hosted minstrels; this interpretation is ours. The information showing Dertli's direct connection with the Amasya region is the TDV record of the Amasya minstrels' gatherings.

Poetry

According to the TDV assessment, Dertli's poems show the influence of the divan poets Fuzûlî and Rûhî of Baghdad and of the folk poets Âşık Ömer, Gevherî, Kaygusuz Abdal and Pir Sultan Abdal. He wrote in both aruz and syllabic metre and showed his real achievement in syllabic verse. Although his poems are full of foreign words and compounds, they possess a certain lyricism; he recalls in mournful language the family he left in poverty in his village. His closeness to the free outlook of the Bektashi lodges led to unfavourable opinions of him among the people. His divan was published in lithograph in Istanbul under the title Dîvân-ı Derdli in 1299 and 1329 of the Hijri calendar, and its reliable editions were made by Ahmet Talat (Bolu 1928) and Haşim Nezihi Okay (Istanbul 1954).

Hakverdioğlu counts the poems recorded under the name Dertli in the Merzifon Cönkü as six in syllabic metre and one in aruz; in the poem section of the article, however, five koşmas and one müseddes are seen. The koşmas begin with the lines "Yâr neden tatlanır neden hoşlanır", "Bir yere cem olmuş birkaç âşıklar", "Hatırına düşüp sorarsa hâlim", "İlâhî zulmete düşürüp yolum" and "Leyle-i zulmetde pervâne diller". The müseddes in aruz opens with the line "Arz-ı hâlim râya düşdüm çok efgân eyledim"; for this poem Hakverdioğlu refers to the anthology of Kerbelâ elegies by Mehmet Arslan and Mehtap Doğan. Since the article gives only the first quatrain or stanza of each poem, each of these six pieces has been published on our site as a separate article in the Dertli category, with its original text, an English rendering and a commentary.

State of the Sources

The attribution of the poems in the cönk to Dertli of Bolu rests on the pen-name record in the cönk and on Hakverdioğlu's mention of Dertli among the well-known minstrels. We could not compare the poems with the editions of Ahmet Talat and Haşim Nezihi Okay, so we cannot say which of them appear in the divan. The pen name Dertli was also used by other minstrels. Dertli Garip (Cuma Zeytünlü) of Gaziler Ovacığı, presented in a separate category on our site, is one of them and lived in the twentieth century; he has nothing to do with the poems in the cönk. The fact that the sixth syllabic poem counted by Hakverdioğlu does not appear in the article must be a difference of counting or printing.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Orhan Bilgin, Merzifonlu İki Şair: Eyüp Sabrî, Hıfzî, Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1992 (as cited by Hakverdioğlu 2019).

Academic studies

Books

  • Mehmet Arslan, Mehtap Doğan, Kerbelâ Mersiyeleri, Ankara: Grafiker Yayınları, 2009, p. 218 (as cited by Hakverdioğlu 2019).

Online sources