Amasya's literary memory was built not only by court poets, madrasa teachers and statesmen, but also by poets who sang in village guest rooms, before shrines and in the gatherings of the cem. One of them was Fedâî Baba, born in 1855 in the village of Yassıçal, who spent his life reading, writing and travelling. A Hak âşığı (a poet-minstrel of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition) who did not play the saz but composed verse on the spot, he left 252 known poems. They were collected by Abdullah Çelebi and published in 1991 as "Amasya'lı Fedayi Baba Divanı". Very little academic work has been devoted to him, and much of what is known about his life comes from the introduction to the divan, from his own lines and from local accounts.

Birth and Family

Fedâî Baba was born in 1855 in Yassıçal, one of the villages attached to the centre of Amasya. His given name was Hüseyin; his father was İsmail, son of Konaş, and his mother was Zehra Bacı. In the introduction to the divan, the epithet "Konaş oğlu" is traced to his descent from Seyid Bali Ergonaş, who is counted among the Horasan erens and lies buried at Uluköy in Taşova. When the Surname Law was passed he took the surname Gümüş. In the closing couplets of his poems he calls himself "Fedâî", and among the people he was known as Fedâî Baba.

According to the accounts, the village lay in the countryside and its people were generally poor, living from livestock and farming, yet education was held in high regard. Yassıçal had a primary school that prepared pupils for the madrasas of the province, and children came to study there even from neighbouring villages. We are told that the village still ranks among those with the highest literacy rates. In this setting, where both Alevi-Bektashi belief and the religious sciences of the sharia were taught, there were well-trained teachers; Molla Mehmet Efendi, Fedâî Baba's contemporary, is remembered as one of them, a scholar well versed in the religious sciences. That Fedâî carried both madrasa learning and the discipline of the dervish lodge can be explained by this two-sided village environment.

The Madrasa Years

Hüseyin was the only son of the family. His elderly father farmed and mobilised everything he owned so that his son could study, and he wished him to become a good madrasa teacher. But the boy would not stay at home and used to sleep at shrines at night. Cafer Özdemir's article reports this as a rumour and regards it as the first sign of a "different personality". His father was greatly saddened by this behaviour but did not give up, and in the end persuaded his son to go to the madrasa. Hüseyin thus began to attend the Kapıağa Madrasa beside the Kunç Bridge in Amasya. With its octagonal plan, unmatched elsewhere in Turkey, the building still stands on the same spot.

The sources do not fully agree on how his madrasa education ended. İsa Çolaker presents the madrasa as the beginning of a life devoted to learning and says that Fedâî afterwards gave himself to Sufism. Özdemir notes that, according to one rumour, he left the madrasa without completing it. The account in the introduction to the divan expands on this second version. In his second year of study, it says, the teacher remarked during a lesson that Muʿāwiya had been the Prophet's confidential scribe and was greatly trusted by him, almost counting him among the Ahl al-Bayt; the young Hüseyin, unable to bear this, reacted sharply and left the madrasa. After that he entrusted himself to teachers versed in the science of Sufism and was trained along that path. This is a local account and is not supported by any other document.

What he learned at the madrasa nonetheless left him a lasting store of knowledge. Özdemir ties his use of Qur'anic verses in his poems to this schooling and notes that Fedâî had a command of the Qur'an and the religious sciences. The frequent use in the divan of Arabic and Persian terms and of abjad and letter symbolism likewise bears the trace of that learning.

Sufi Training and Derûnî Baba

Fedâî Baba received his spiritual training from Derûnî Baba, a descendant of Şeyh Mahmut Velî, who is buried in the Erbaa district of Tokat. The sources available to us do not describe the details of this relationship: how long he stayed with him, how he was trained, or whether he received a licence (icazet). What is known is that he learned Sufi knowledge from this figure and that his poems return constantly to concepts such as the guide (mürşit), ilm-i ledün (knowledge received directly from God), zikir, the four gates and divine love. In a quatrain quoted by Çolaker the need for a guide is stated outright: a man of learning cannot grasp his own truth without finding a mürşit; even if he dived into the sea of knowledge, read a thousand books and spoke Arabic and Persian lexicons, he could not know the subtlety of ledün knowledge.

One of the familiar shared motifs of the âşık tradition also appears in this life story. In that tradition the poet is said to begin his path in a dream, drinking bade, that is, the wine of love from the hand of a pir or a saint. Özdemir notes that Fedâî Baba too, in keeping with this tradition, took his first step as an âşık by drinking bade in a dream. The summary of the article also records that many miracles (kerâmet) are told of the poet, but it does not give the details of these stories.

A Travelling Life

Fedâî Baba's life of eighty-five years was spent reading, writing and travelling. After his father's death he farmed in summer and travelled around villages and towns in the winter months. Özdemir writes that, because he often toured Amasya and its surroundings, he may be regarded as a kind of itinerant âşık. This pattern of a farmer-poet who took to the road when the fields lay resting is not unfamiliar in the âşık tradition of Anatolia.

Traces of this wandering are visible in the poems as well. Özdemir records that the divan includes poems about the shrines and villages he visited, as well as advice poems (nasihatnâme) addressed to the people. According to the article's assessment, the âşık tried in his own time to educate the people and show them the right path, aiming to strengthen the bond of brotherhood within Anatolian society. Another of the study's conclusions is that in his long life of eighty-five years he successfully carried on the tradition that preceded him.

His not playing the saz sets him apart among âşıks. While most folk poets are remembered with their saz, in Fedâî Baba it is voice and word that stand out. Even so, he possessed one of the most valued gifts of the âşık tradition, irticalen, the power to compose verse without prior preparation. That he could speak in verse directly, in a gathering or during a journey, suggests that some of his poems were born of particular events and occasions.

Between Divan and Folk Poetry

Fedâî Baba's poems do not gather in a single style. According to Özdemir, the âşık composed poems in keeping with both the divan (classical court) tradition and the folk poetry tradition. His poems in the divan manner are heavier in language than those in the folk manner, loaded with Arabic and Persian words and long compounds. The quatrains in folk form have a plainer diction. The article describes him in general as writing in a lyrical style. Çolaker too writes that he spoke his deyiş in an ecstatic, flowing language and presented the features of the tarikat on a human scale.

The Themes of His Poetry

According to Özdemir, Fedâî Baba treated the principal themes of the Sufi tradition, such as ilm-i ledün, the guide, zikir, the four gates, divine love and tevhid (the oneness of God). The four gates is the name given to the stages of sharia, tarikat, marifet and hakikat; in one poem of the divan they are listed together with the forty stations. Because he belonged to the Alevi-Bektashi tradition, his poems also frequently feature love of Hz. Ali, belief in the Ahl al-Bayt, the twelve imams and the event of Kerbelâ. In one poem praising Hz. Ali, the letters of the Arabic alphabet are set out in order, each placed at the head of a line of praise, and the poem ends with the line "FEDAİ'yem Aleviyem Pirim Bektaşi Veli" ("I am Fedâî, I am Alevi, my pir is Bektaşi Veli"). In the poems on Muharrem and Kerbelâ, the pain of love is bound to the martyrdom of Hz. Hüseyin. In one of them the poet defines his own grief as "Derdim Şah Hüseyin Kerbelâ derdi" ("my grief is the grief of Shah Hüseyin, the grief of Kerbelâ") and says that he did not seek the cure for his wound from Plato or Luqmān.

Sufi thought is the second axis at the centre of the divan. In a poem that begins "Yeri göğü her eşyayı aradım / Tamamı noksanı özümde buldum" ("I searched the earth, the sky, every thing; I found the whole and the lacking within myself"), Fedâî says he found pearl and coral, the exegesis of the Qur'an, Hz. Muhammed, the Ceyhan and the ocean within his own essence. This is a typical expression of the bond that the Sufi tradition draws between a person's knowing himself and knowing God. The same outlook appears in another poem that stresses the inner rather than the outward meaning of the pilgrimage. In this poem, with the refrain "Hakikatte Kâbe veçhi Ademdir" ("in truth the Kaaba is the face of man"), the poet seeks the real meaning of the Kaaba in the human face and heart. He pairs entering the state of ihram with taking off the clothes one wears, and stoning Satan at Mina with overcoming ignorance, and says that whoever wipes everything other than God from the heart is the true pilgrim. In the final stanza of the poem it is said that one who finds a guide will understand the secret of the Kaaba.

In the examples quoted by Çolaker, Fedâî says that not every hand is a hand that bestows a share, so the hand one takes must be chosen with care, and he recommends turning in supplication to Hacı Bektaş Velî. In another quatrain he describes the attributes of God as visible in the cosmos and the knowers (ârif) passing from attribute to essence. According to Çolaker, names such as Hacı Bektaş Velî, Yunus Emre and Mevlânâ are among the sources that fed his poetry. His verse is thus bound both to the Alevi-Bektashi hearth and to the wider shared inheritance of Anatolian Sufism.

Another poem in the divan describes travellers caught in a February blizzard on a mountaintop begging Hızır for help. In this poem, which closes with the refrain "Yetiş imdadıma Hızır elâman" ("hasten to my aid, Hızır"), the snow-covered road, the invisible destination and the fear of becoming prey to wolves and birds are put into words. It deserves particular attention because it reflects a concrete experience from the winter journeys of a travelling poet. The same divan also contains poems on the mourning of Muharrem and the martyrs of Kerbelâ, and in some of them Muʿāwiya is attacked directly. Read together with the account of the madrasa story, these lines show that the poet's sectarian sensibility remained decisive throughout his life.

His Poems on Atatürk and the Events of His Time

Fedâî Baba's poems are not confined to religious and Sufi subjects. Özdemir records that the divan contains poems on Atatürk and Amasya. In the part quoted from the divan, three poems are given under the heading "Examples of what was written for Atatürk and for the World War and Amasya". In one of them the poet praises Mustafa Kemal as the sultan of the pole, the candle and lamp of the world, the sky of the Republican era, and says that he brought a people left in darkness into the light. In the same poem İsmet Paşa and Fevzi Paşa are named as viziers, and the laying of railway lines across the country is recalled with praise.

Another poem takes a collective stance. With lines such as "Aslımız Türk, neslimiz Türk, Türk milleti derler bize" ("our root is Turk, our lineage is Turk, they call us the Turkish nation") and "Sinemiz siper edip adûya karşı durmuşuz" ("we have stood against the enemy, making our breasts a shield"), the poet places himself and his people within a community that stands against the foe. The reference to the Greeks in the poem suggests that it may belong to the years of the Turkish War of Independence, but the sources do not give the poem's date. Alevi-Bektashi belief and the sense of being Turkish stand side by side in these lines without being separated.

The long elegy he wrote on Atatürk's death also deserves note. In this poem with the refrain "Eyvah göçtü Türk atası" ("alas, the father of the Turks has departed"), Fedâî Baba says that Mustafa Kemal was born in 1881, died in 1938 and was buried in Ankara. The elegy also carries concrete details that show how the poet perceived the reforms of his day through a villager's eyes. The abolition of the tithe (öşür), the shortening of military service to two years, medicine available free of charge, and the arrival of railways and aeroplanes in the country are listed directly in the poem. In this respect the elegy is a document of how the Anatolian villager looked upon the practices of the early years of the Republic.

His Last Years and Death

Fedâî Baba died in 1940 at the age of eighty-five. The elegy he wrote on Atatürk's death falls in the last years of his life. The location of his grave and the details of his funeral do not appear in the sources available to us; since no certain information exists on this, nothing has been said.

The poems he left behind were published in 1991 in Istanbul by Can Yayınları in Abdullah Çelebi's compilation. This edition remains the main way to reach Fedâî Baba's poems today. Cafer Özdemir's article of 2017 is a study that treats his biography and his understanding of Sufism within an academic framework. Özdemir explains the reason for the article by the fact that, although Fedâî Baba had a strong influence in the region, too little research had been done on him. İsa Çolaker, in his column, likewise writes that he could not have discovered this value had he not seen the divan, and that he thinks the Amasya poet is little known.

His Place in Amasya's Cultural Life

In the Ottoman period Amasya was a city where princes were trained and where madrasas and dervish lodges were numerous. In this cultural setting Fedâî Baba's place is that of a poet who forged a link between bookish knowledge and the speech of the people. On one side he drew on the Arabic and Persian learning gained from madrasa education, and on the other he used together the deyiş, nefes and panegyric forms of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition. In Özdemir's words, he skilfully blended the basic features of Sufi and Bektashi culture in his poems.

His poems throw direct light on the world of Alevi-Bektashi culture around Amasya in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is, on its understanding of faith, its holy persons and its view of social events. A life that began at the Kapıağa Madrasa, matured beside Derûnî Baba and was carried on by travelling from village to village is the biography of a period in which the madrasa, the dervish lodge and âşık culture were interwoven. In this respect Fedâî Baba represents a link in Amasya's literary history that has not been sufficiently studied.

Chronology

1855: Hüseyin (Fedâî Baba) was born in the village of Yassıçal, Amasya.

Date unknown: He attended the Kapıağa Madrasa beside the Kunç Bridge in Amasya; there is a rumour that he left his education unfinished.

Date unknown: He received Sufi training from Derûnî Baba, a descendant of Şeyh Mahmut Velî, who is buried in Erbaa.

After 1938: He wrote his elegy on Atatürk's death, with the refrain "Eyvah göçtü Türk atası".

1940: He died at the age of eighty-five.

1991: His poems were published by Abdullah Çelebi as "Amasya'lı Fedayi Baba Divanı".

2017: Cafer Özdemir's article "Hak Âşığı Amasyalı Fedâî Baba ve Tasavvuf Kültürü" was published.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Çelebi, Abdullah. Amasya'lı Fedayi Baba Divanı. Istanbul: Can Yayınları, 1991.

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources