Derviş Edna, whose real name was Mehmet Ercelep, was an Alevi minstrel and dervish born in 1878 in the village of Karahisar, formerly Karasar, in Çorum, and who died in the same village in 1928. His native village belongs to Çorum; his connection with Amasya comes from the minstrel milieu of Gaziler Ovacığı, which also takes in villages along the border of Amasya and Çorum, from his guide Kul Fakir of Merzifon, and from the survival of his deyiş in the villages of Amasya as well. The nature of this connection is discussed separately below. His deyiş were preserved in the notebooks and memories of those who loved him and were collected and published in 2008 by Mehmet Çevik and in 2016 by Ali Onar and Caner Işık. In this category the forty deyiş published by Onar and Işık, together with two quatrains quoted in the article in the account of his life, are given each on its own page, with the original text, a modern rendering and commentary.

His Life

According to the information collected by Onar and Işık, Derviş Edna was born in 1878, in the month of Ramadan, on the Night of Power. That night a dede known as İdrislerin Mehmet Dede had come to the village to hold a cem; his pregnant mother also took part in the cem, and when her pains began during the semah she was brought home. To name the child, the names Kadir, Hamdi and Mehmet were written on slips of paper and lots were drawn, and three times his mother drew the name Mehmet. It is told that when Mehmet Dede came the next day his mother said to him, "Would we give him any other name while yours is there". His father's name was Bektaş and his mother's Fadik. With the Surname Law of 1934 his family took the surname Ercelep.

According to the accounts he was of medium height, slightly stooped, bearded, and gathered his long hair, braided into twelve plaits, inside the green turban on his head. He came of a poor family and made his living as a shepherd in the village. It is told that while grazing his flock he sang deyiş in his plaintive voice and that the beauty of his voice won the admiration of all around him. According to the entry in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, his lines "Derviş Edna'm doğru gider yolumuz / Aktan okur kara bilmez dilimiz" show that he could not read or write.

He married twice. His first wife was Satı Bacı, his paternal aunt's daughter; according to information quoted from Çevik's book, Satı Bacı was a mature woman of the path who had served Sefil Ali, and there were no children of this marriage. His second wife was Zeynep Bacı; Zeynep died in 1985 and was buried beside Derviş Edna. Onar and Işık write that the elder of Derviş Edna's two children was his daughter Behiye Ercelep, born in 1926 and died in 2015, and that Behiye lost her father two years after her birth; in the article's list of informants Behiye Ercelep is shown as living in Merzifon. An account quoted from Çevik, however, speaks of a son, Halil İbrahim, who was forty days old after Derviş Edna's death. The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü writes that he had only a daughter named Behiya from his second marriage.

Derviş Edna died in 1928 and, according to his will, was buried beside the tomb called Akkubbe in his village. According to the village elders Akkubbe is a tomb three hundred years old in which a holy man named Abdullah lies; the people relate that Derviş Edna wished to be buried there because they believe he carried the same soul as this man. For a long time the grave was not covered, the earth was levelled, and the owner of the land, Sadık Çavuş, began to use the place as a garden; one day, when his sons saw the shroud while digging, the place of the grave was marked, first the grave was built and then it was roofed over. Today it forms a second tomb under the same roof as Akkubbe. Onar and Işık also note that it is not known why Sadık Çavuş, one of Derviş Edna's devotees, used the grave as a garden, nor what secret surrounds his death.

Derviş Edna as a Saint

Onar and Işık write that in Gaziler Ovacığı the word "gerçek" (true one) is used in the sense of saint and that many saints lived in the region. Derviş Edna is remembered as one of these saints: he took part in gatherings of fellowship and in the cem rite, called people to the path of God, counselled them to do good and keep away from evil. According to the article his worth was not recognised in his lifetime; he was scorned and mocked in his own village, yet he bore no one a grudge and voiced his reproach only by saying, "I could not tear your black veil". He was loved more in the neighbouring villages than in his own, and even in hard winter conditions people came from distant villages to share his fellowship.

The legends told about him carry the traces of this reverence. It is told that during the First World War, when Russian soldiers had cornered the husband at the front of Saniye Bacı, one of a company that came to him from Gümüşhacıköy, and the man was about to take his own life, he saved him by his prayer, and then took the family in until the husband returned. Another account relates that one day when he did not wish to go to the cem, the roads turned to mud by rain became like asphalt for him, and that in the cem he refused the ritual food saying "it has the lawful and the unlawful in it". It is also told that he turned back a rain cloud coming over the village by saying, "Where are you coming, blessed one, go over there". Onar and Işık note that such wonders are tales one is obliged to draw upon when telling the lives of dervishes, tales that make them both attractive and awe-inspiring figures.

His Bond with Kul Fakir

According to Onar and Işık, Derviş Edna's guide was Kul Fakir of Merzifon. Because Kul Fakir lived in Merzifon, Derviş Edna travelled back and forth to that region, became known over a wide area, and took part in the cem and sang his deyiş in the places he visited. The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, drawing on Ali Cem Akbulut, writes that Derviş Edna's master was Kul Fakir and his guide Ali Haydar Ulusoy; Ali Haydar Efendi was one of the çelebis of Hacı Bektaş. Necdet Kurt too counts Derviş Edna among the âşıks Kul Fakir helped to train. There is a separate category on our site for Kul Fakir.

The article also shows this bond through stories. When some presumptuous men of the village set about putting themselves in the place of the saints, Derviş Edna wished in his heart for Kul Fakir to come; shortly afterwards Kul Fakir arrived at Karasar, saz in hand, together with Halil Ağa, the son of Kul Hüseyin, and put them to shame. One day Derviş Edna, not wanting to leave Kul Fakir, mounted his horse and then got down again on the other side; another day Kul Fakir said, "Derviş Edna, the heart is in the heart. Now go back to your country", divided an apple he took from his pocket into four and gave him a piece. These scenes appear directly in Derviş Edna's deyiş. Onar and Işık regard the likeness of the line "our tongue reads from the white, does not know the black" to Kul Fakir's line "our pir reads from the white, does not know the black" as clear evidence of Kul Fakir's influence on Derviş Edna. For the category of Kul Hüseyin, Kul Fakir's master: Kul Hüseyin.

His Connection with Amasya

Derviş Edna was not from Amasya; the village of Karahisar, where he was born, lived and was buried, belongs to the central district of Çorum. Several threads tie him to the literature of Amasya. According to Onar and Işık, Gaziler Ovacığı takes in the Gümüşhacıköy, Merzifon and Suluova districts of Amasya and a few villages of Çorum lying on the Amasya side; Karahisar is one of these villages. His guide Kul Fakir lived in Merzifon, and Derviş Edna travelled there. Some of the devotees who came to see him were from Gümüşhacıköy. Onar and Işık collected his deyiş both in Karahisar and in the villages of Amasya. His daughter Behiye appears to have lived in Merzifon. His name appears in the list of âşıks of Amasya cited in the studies of Şerife Özer and Mustafa Topal and of Fatih Çelebi; the list is repeated in our article The minstrel tradition in Amasya. Mehmet Çevik, on the other hand, counts him in his book among the "Hak âşıkları of Çorum".

His Poetry

Derviş Edna's deyiş are generally in the style of the nefes, describing the structure of Alevi belief; Onar and Işık class them as nefes, nasihatname, mersiye, medetname and düvaz-ı imam. He mostly used the eleven-syllable metre and in a few deyiş the eight- and seven-syllable metres. According to the article his language is an extremely limpid Turkish; chain structures and the carrying of words from one quatrain to the next made the deyiş easy to memorise. The deyiş were first written down in the notebooks of his devotees and reached our day through their children; Hasan Yüceer has a notebook kept by his father. The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, drawing on Ziya Gürel's 1980 book, also notes that he has deyiş on the subject of Shah Abbas.

The subjects of the deyiş are wide: devotion to the guide and the joy of meeting him, the pledge of Elest, laments for Karbala and the Twelve Imams, the order of the cem, the dar and the ritual food, the end of time and the expectation of the Mahdi, and counsel of patience against a corrupt age and of keeping the secret. Onar and Işık stress one point in particular: Derviş Edna treated in his deyiş the belief in "changing moulds", the soul's return to the world in different bodies. The lines "I have come to this passing realm and gone many times" and "though I lived three hundred years my turn would come again" are plain expressions of this belief. Some deyiş also give a date; according to the article's explanations these dates correspond to the years 1909-1910, 1911-1912 and 1917-1918. Since Derviş Edna died in 1928, his deyiş are not under copyright.

The State of the Sources

Almost all the information about Derviş Edna rests on oral accounts and the notebooks of his devotees. The first collection is Mehmet Çevik's book Çorumlu Hak Âşıkları: Derviş Edna ve Fedai, published in 2008; Çevik writes that for this work he gathered information from his daughter Behiye and his friends of the heart and went to his village and visited his tomb. In 2016 Onar and Işık published forty deyiş, comparing Çevik's book, the notebook held by Hasan Yüceer and a wide field collection, and state that they corrected some errors in Çevik's texts. The conclusion of the article says that thirty-nine deyiş were found, but the list of deyiş contains forty titles; all forty have been published in this category.

The sources differ on some details. According to the text quoted from Çevik, Derviş Edna was one of three children, two boys and a girl, while the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü writes that he had two siblings, a brother and a sister. According to Onar and Işık his guide was Kul Fakir; the same dictionary, drawing on Akbulut, shows Kul Fakir as his master and Ali Haydar Ulusoy as his guide. As to his children too, the dictionary speaks of only one daughter, while Onar and Işık speak of two children and an account quoted from Çevik mentions a son. The pen-name quatrain of one deyiş stands at the end of another deyiş in Çevik's book. We could not consult Akbulut's 2010 book, Çevik's book or Gürel's work directly; we give the information in them as reported in Onar and Işık's article, in the dictionary entry and in an online collection of deyiş that publishes extracts from Çevik's book.

Chronology

1878: He is born in the village of Karahisar (Karasar) in Çorum, on the Night of Power in the month of Ramadan.

1909-1918: According to the article's explanations, the dates mentioned in some of his deyiş fall in these years.

1926: His daughter Behiye is born.

1928: He dies at Karahisar and, according to his will, is buried beside the Akkubbe tomb.

1934: With the Surname Law his family takes the surname Ercelep.

2008: Mehmet Çevik publishes his deyiş under the title Çorumlu Hak Âşıkları: Derviş Edna ve Fedai.

2016: Ali Onar and Caner Işık publish forty of his deyiş in corrected form.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

Online sources