Erzurumlu Emrah is one of the best-known minstrel poets (saz şairi) of the nineteenth century and is regarded as the founder of a branch of the minstrel tradition in Anatolia. He was not born in Amasya, and he left no document showing that he lived there; his name appears in this section because eleven of his poems are found in a manuscript poetry miscellany compiled in Merzifon, the Merzifon Cönkü published by Metin Hakverdioğlu. Hakverdioğlu writes that Merzifon, as a halting place on the roads, played host to the minstrels of the period, and he counts Emrah among the names who accepted the invitations of the poets of Merzifon. The basis of this statement and its fit with the dates are discussed separately below.

Life

According to Nurettin Albayrak's entry in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Emrah was born in the village of Tanbura in the Ilıca district of Erzurum. His date of birth and his family are unknown; Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu proposed 1814-1819 and Eflâtun Cem Güney 1777-1784, and later research has mostly supported the second view, that is, the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In his youth he went from his village to Erzurum, continued his studies at a madrasa, and there learned the taste and the technique of divan poetry. He is not one of the minstrels said to have become poets by drinking a mystic cup (bâde); his art was acquired through learning.

After some time he left Erzurum and travelled through regions such as Trabzon, Kastamonu, Sivas, Tokat, Çankırı and Niğde, and joined the Hâlidiyye branch of the Nakşibendî order. Wherever he went he trained many apprentices, above all Tokatlı Gedâî and Tokatlı Nûrî; the minstrel branch bearing his name spread through these apprentices. Tradition relates that before his death Emrah left his saz and his word to Nûrî and his power of memory to Gedâî. He spent the last years of his life in Niksar, in the province of Tokat, and died there. The year of his death is disputed: Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir and Ahmet Talat (Onay) accept 1876, some researchers the 1854-55 on his gravestone inscription, while Cahit Öztelli proposes 1860 on the basis of the chronogram line Tokatlı Nûrî composed for his master, "Nûrî ne güzel söylemiş üstâdına rahmet". His tomb in Niksar, built under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, was opened in 1986.

Connection with Amasya

Emrah's connection with Amasya can be established only through the Merzifon Cönkü. Hakverdioğlu acquired this cönk for his own library from Merzifon and, from signs such as a Merzifon beauty being mentioned in two of its poems and a separate section being devoted to the poems of Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon, concluded that it was compiled in Merzifon, most probably by a poet named Fethî. The cönk contains one hundred and sixty-one poems by thirty-two poets, and Emrah is among the poets with the most poems recorded after Tokatlı Nûrî.

The abstract of the article says that names such as Dertli, Emrah, Nûrî and Âşık Ömer accepted the invitations of Merzifon poets such as Eyüb Sabrî. Although this sentence suggests that Emrah came to Merzifon, it is hard to use as evidence. Eyüb Sabrî was born in 1843 and died in 1866 at the age of twenty-four; two of the dates proposed for Emrah's death (1854-55 and 1860) fall in years when Sabrî was still a child or in early youth. The statement in the abstract is therefore best understood as a general description of Merzifon as a town that hosted minstrels, not as documentation that each name was individually Sabrî's guest. The minstrel known to have been invited to Merzifon by Sabrî is Emrah's apprentice Tokatlı Nûrî. That Emrah's poems were read in Merzifon and entered a cönk can easily be explained by the influence in this region of his apprentice Nûrî and of the minstrel branch he founded.

Poetry

Albayrak presents Emrah as a poet very close to divan poetry in the general mood of his poems, one who opened the language of the minstrel poets to the vocabulary of divan literature. Sufi elements and features of local speech are the distinctive sides of his poetry; love, separation, exile and complaint against the age are his main themes. The poems that show his true personality are those he wrote in syllabic metre; although his aruz poems are more numerous, their faults of form and language prevent him from being counted a classical poet. He tried to write response poems (nazire) to Fuzûlî, Bâkî and Nedîm. Most of his poems were gathered in a manuscript by his apprentice Tokatlı Nûrî; the first part of this manuscript contains 348 poems Emrah wrote in syllabic metre and in aruz, the last part Nûrî's own poems. His aruz poems were also printed in Istanbul in 1332 as a fifty-six-page booklet entitled "Dîvân-ı Emrah" by Abdülaziz of Erzurum, one of the sheikhs of the Rifâî order.

The Merzifon Cönkü contains eleven poems under Emrah's name, three koşmas in syllabic metre and eight in aruz: one dîvânî, one semai, three kalenderîs, two ghazals and one dîvân. Hakverdioğlu published only the first verse unit of these poems, that is, the first quatrains of the koşmas and the opening couplets of the aruz poems. Each of these first units is given on a separate page in this category, with its original text, a modern Turkish rendering and commentary. One of the koşmas is on the rose and the nightingale, one on a reproachful beloved, one on a heart unable to open itself to the fair; among the aruz poems are a dîvânî describing a longing for the tavern and its gathering, a ghazal addressed to the dawn breeze and a prayer with the refrain "hû dost". The kalenderî beginning "İtdi beni bir yâr-i perî-şân iki yüzden", with its pun on "perî-şân" and "perîşân", shows Emrah's fondness for wordplay in aruz poetry.

State of the Sources

Over the centuries Emrah's poems have become mixed with those of other poets. Albayrak writes that the poems of Ercişli Emrah were long attributed to the more famous Erzurumlu Emrah, which gave rise to debate. Eyüp Akman's entry on Tokatlı Nûrî in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü also reports that, because of the response poems Nûrî wrote to his master's poems, thirty-nine poems are recorded in the sources under the names of both Emrah and Nûrî. For this reason the Merzifon Cönkü's recording of a poem under Emrah's name does not by itself prove that the poem is Emrah's; the cönk shows whose poem it was read as in nineteenth-century Merzifon. A comparison of the eleven poems in the cönk with the poems in Emrah's printed or manuscript collections has not yet been made, and cannot be made until the full texts are published.

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