Travelers entering Amasya from the direction of Tokat, where the Yeşilırmak valley narrows and the road draws close to the foot of a sheer rock, can make out a long cleft cut into the face of the stone. Local people call this rock Ferhat Rock, the ridge behind it Mount Ferhat, the gorge in front of it Ferhatarası, and the cleft itself the Ferhat Water Canal. Right beside the canal stands a museum, and on the hilltop above it two bronze figures: one with his pickaxe raised into the air, the other about to let herself fall into the void. All these names and monuments lead back to the same story: the story of Ferhat, the painter-decorator who bored through a mountain to win Şirin, who died at the threshold of union because of a lie, and of the beloved who followed him. Scholarly research shows that the canal was cut long before any Ferhat, to supply ancient Amaseia with water, yet this knowledge has not shaken the story's place in the city. Rock and story have stood side by side for centuries; the one gave the other its name, and the other gave the first a place to belong.

The story of Ferhat and Şirin has been told in Iran, Azerbaijan, Central Asia and almost every corner of Anatolia, and it has passed into verse romances, chapbooks, the repertoires of minstrels, the Karagöz shadow screen, the opera and ballet stage and the cinema. Amasya is the setting of only one branch of this vast tradition, but that branch has taken root in the city so deeply that today a canal, a rock, a mountain, a locality, a museum and a monument all bear Ferhat's name. The rock has stood in the same place for centuries, while the story grows a little longer in the mouth of every teller.

The Story as Told in Amasya

The Ferhat and Şirin story attached to Amasya has no single text. The main written versions available to us are three. The first is the short compilation in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's Culture Atlas: here Şirin is the sister of Mehmene Banu, Sultan of Amasya, and the story is confined to the pavilion, the condition, the false news and the two deaths. The second is the long narrative in A. Demiray's Resimli Amasya, published in 1954; this text is summarized in a 2021 study by Keziban and Metin Orbay, and it begins the events in Khorasan and ends them at Şahinkaya, fifteen kilometers south of Amasya. The third is the "Hikâye-i Ferhad ile Şirin," read for centuries in lithograph and chapbook form; a copy held in the HAGEM library of the Ministry of Culture under the number 398.222 FER, copied by Hüseyin Hüsnî, was published in Metin Özarslan's book Ferhat ile Şirin Mukayeseli Bir Araştırma, and in 2014 Mehmet Emin Bars set out its plot in twenty points. To these must be added the belief about Ferhat Rock that Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn recorded in his Amasya Tarihi as "a strange tale that occupies the tongues of the common people." These texts build a common plot, but each fills it with its own details and at certain points departs from the others.

The Pavilion and the Painter

The chapbook opens with the description of a city. In the land of Khorasan there is a great city "set in a place of fine air, surrounded by vineyards, gardens and rose beds, with a river flowing through every garden"; its people are fond of pleasure, its women and men are beautiful, and its ruler is a woman. This ruler is Mehmene Banu. She has a niece named Şirin, thirteen or fourteen years old, whose beauty is the talk of the city; the text describes her like the beloved of Ottoman court poetry: eyebrows like bows, the cap of fortune on her head. Mehmene Banu has a seven-colored pavilion built for Şirin that changes color according to the rule of the stars, and she gives its decoration to the city's finest painter-decorator, Behzat, and his son Ferhat. Ferhat too is fifteen; the chapbook describes him as a youth fair as the moon, with black brows and lashes, white skin and languid eyes, and says he surpassed his father in skill. The short account in the Culture Atlas presents Ferhat as a valiant young decorator who adorns pavilions and palaces and astonishes all who look upon his work, and it adds: all the beauty that flowed from Ferhat's brush was for Şirin, so they say.

The first meeting of the two young people also changes with the teller. In the folk tale summarized by Nurettin Albayrak in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, Şirin comes to see the pavilion, falls in love with Ferhat at first sight, Ferhat gives her his heart in turn, and a long romance begins between them. In the chapbook the scene is more delicate: Şirin, who has come to visit the pavilion with Mehmene Banu, hides herself in the garden and, to make her love known, throws Ferhat a golden bitter orange and a golden lemon; that night Ferhat cannot sleep, and in the morning he starts work three hours before his father. In Demiray's account Şirin and Ferhat meet for the first time in the pavilion, and their hearts catch fire with the unquenchable flame of divine love. In the Culture Atlas text the two fall for each other at a single glance and begin to meet in secret. From that day on, the patterns on the pavilion walls began to speak a language only two people understood.

The Impossible Condition

In the long versions Ferhat is tested by a mountain twice, and the first test is not yet a condition for marriage. In the TDV folk tale, when the pavilion is finished Şirin says she wishes a stream to flow before it; Mehmene Banu has criers announce that whoever achieves this will have every wish granted. In the chapbook the water is found by the slave girls, while in Demiray Mehmene Banu and Şirin, strolling in the countryside on a spring day, come upon clear water murmuring sweetly at the edge of a grove, and Şirin wants this water to flow past her own pavilion too. Ferhat volunteers. In the TDV version he says he will pierce the nearby mountain of Bîsütun and bring the spring beyond it within forty days, and he finishes in thirty-nine; in the chapbook he bores the mountain and brings the water in forty days by one account, in a year by another. In return he asks to be made steward of the palace, he is given the post of keeper of the gate, and Mehmene Banu has her chief cook lay three tables a day for him. In Demiray's version Ferhat finishes this first task in a short time with a pickaxe weighing fifteen hundred kilos and, at his own request, is taken into the palace.

The short Amasya version in the Culture Atlas has only one mountain and one condition, and that condition is tied directly to Şirin's hand. Ferhat sends go-betweens to ask for Şirin. The sultan does not want to give her sister and, to make the matter hard, demands something impossible: "Bring water to our city, which suffers from thirst, and I will give you Şirin." The nearest water lies at a far, far-off place called Elma Dağı. In a similar account related by Uğur Biryol in a 2014 travel piece, the place of the water is given as Şahinkayası. The aim of those who set the condition is to keep Ferhat busy, to forget him inside the mountain and keep him away from Şirin, for no one believes a man can bore through a mountain. Ferhat takes up his pickaxe and, in the tale's own words, begins to strike at the flanks of the rocks. The condition had been set, and inside the condition a trick had lain hidden from the start.

Dungeon, Cave and Hürmüz Şah

The story that moves straight to the mountain in the short Amasya version takes in an exile and a war in the long accounts. In the chapbook Mehmene Banu tells Şirin that, were it possible, she would have Ferhat married to herself; in Mehmet Emin Bars's reading, although the text never says so openly, Mehmene Banu's own heart lies behind her keeping Ferhat away from Şirin. When one of the slave girls reports that the two young people meet in secret, Mehmene Banu has the girl killed so that the affair will not be heard of, and has Ferhat thrown into a dungeon. The TDV summary names this prison the Iron Castle, Kal'a-i Âhenîn. In the dungeon Ferhat wails without cease and his voice disturbs the people; the poems he writes for Şirin reach her through the slave girl Servinaz. In Demiray's account those passing the dungeon listen to Ferhat's saz and heartfelt songs and shed tears.

It is a dream that frees Ferhat. Mehmene Banu sees in her sleep a radiant-faced old sage; in the words Demiray reports, the sage tells her either to release Ferhat from the dungeon the next day or to perish. The frightened ruler gives Ferhat a thousand gold pieces and lets him go. Ferhat gives the gold away to the poor, takes to the mountains and makes himself a cave. According to the TDV summary he befriends the wild beasts, snakes and tigers stand before him like courtiers, and he tries to console himself by painting pictures of Şirin on the walls of his cave. His father Behzat comes and asks him to return home; Ferhat does not return. The chapbook also says that fire came from his mouth when he sighed.

One day Hürmüz Şah, the ruler of Amasya, hears a voice while hunting. In Demiray's account the viziers plunge into the forest and find, under a tree and surrounded by wild animals, a ragged man playing a saz. Before the shah Ferhat tells his sorrow through his saz and his songs, and the tender-hearted Hürmüz Şah's eyes fill with tears. The shah writes a letter to Mehmene Banu: Şirin is to be sent with her dowry and married to Ferhat, or the girl will be taken by force. Mehmene Banu tears up the letter, and a bloody war breaks out between the two rulers. In the chapbook this war is an epic in itself: champions such as Kehrâb and Behrâm, Tâhir and Filsüvar fight in single combat, Ferhat learns the arts of war from a sage in a dream, and Mehmene Banu brings two witches named Azraka and Tantana to avoid defeat, but is routed all the same. In Demiray, Mehmene Banu's most prized champions are struck down by Ferhat's pickaxe, and Şirin is taken captive and brought to the shah's palace. The war was over; only a wedding stood between them and union.

Prince Hüsrev and the Second Mountain

At this very point the story changes direction. Hürmüz Şah's son, Prince Hüsrev, sees Şirin and falls in love with her; in Demiray's account the prince falls sick with love for Şirin just as the wedding preparations are about to begin. Hüsrev, who is the shah of Iran in the classical romance, has become the son of the ruler of Amasya in the folk tale; Albayrak lists this change among the transformations the story underwent as it was adapted to Anatolia. Despite all his father's pleading, the prince will not give up his passion. Hürmüz Şah is caught between the word he gave Ferhat and his son's suffering. In the TDV version he asks the nurse for a remedy; in the chapbook his vizier Bahtigân asks for three days' grace and finally proposes demanding that Ferhat bore through a mountain that cannot be bored; in Demiray the remedy is found by Hüsrev's nurse. The condition is the same everywhere: if Ferhat pierces the mountain opposite and brings the water beyond it to the city, the wedding will begin at once.

Demiray's account gives this mountain a name and a distance: Şahinkaya, fifteen kilometers south of Amasya. This time Ferhat attacks the rocks with a pickaxe of three thousand kilos and brings the water to the city in thirty-nine days through the canal he cuts. In the chapbook pickaxes of one hundred and two hundred batman are made for Ferhat, and for the second mountain he asks for one of three hundred batman; Bars, noting that a batman was roughly 7.7 kilograms, points out that these weights belong to the story's own logic. Şirin comes now and then to the mountain to watch Ferhat, and her maid Gülbeyaz carries news between the lovers. At one parting Ferhat tells Şirin, in the chapbook's words, "my lady, within three days I shall pierce this mountain and we shall have our heart's desire." Seeing Ferhat at work on the mountain, Hürmüz Şah pities him and says that if his son gives up his love, he will give Şirin to Ferhat. Night and day the sound of the pickaxe came down the valley into the city, and there was no one in the city who did not listen to it.

The Old Woman's Fritters

The darkest scene of the story opens here. In the TDV and chapbook versions Hürmüz Şah tells his son's nurse to turn the prince from this love. The nurse says the prince will never give it up, but that if she is permitted she can do away with Ferhat; the shah gives his permission. The nurse disguises herself as an old crone, takes a plate of lokma fritters and goes weeping to Ferhat. In Demiray's account, shedding false tears, she says: My son, you pierced these mountains for Şirin, but Şirin died suddenly last night, and now lokma is being handed out for her soul. Given the Anatolian custom of distributing lokma and helva after a death, the plate in the old woman's hands is the most convincing proof of the lie.

In the short version in the Culture Atlas, it is Mehmene Banu who sends the lie. Seeing that her sister is slipping from her grasp, the sultan lays sly plans and sends an old woman to Ferhat; in the account Biryol relates, this woman is a witch. Following the canal that has been opened and listening for the sound of the pickaxe, the woman finds Ferhat. The sound of the pickaxe that pierces mountains frightens her, but she laughs bitterly and raises her voice: "Why do you strike the rocks so furiously? Your Şirin is dead. Look, I have brought you her helva." In the romance of Hüsrev and Şîrîn, it is Hüsrev himself who sends Ferhad the news of her death; in Samed Vurgun's play of 1941 the lie is told by the painter Şapur, and in the Karagöz play the crone is sent by Şirin's mother. The messengers change; the message stays the same. The lie had opened in a moment the road the pickaxe could not.

The Death of Ferhat

In the Culture Atlas account Ferhat reels at these words as if struck in the head. "If Şirin is gone, living in this world is forbidden to me," he says, and throws into the air the iron pickaxe with which he has pierced the mountains; the pickaxe comes down on his head with all its weight, his cry of "Şirin" echoes among the rocks, and then his voice falls silent. In the TDV folk tale Ferhat throws his pickaxe into the air saying "Now that she is dead, how shall I live" and holds his head beneath it. In Demiray's account the news strikes Ferhat's heart like lightning; he hurls the pickaxe into the air meaning to let it fall on his head and die, and achieves his aim. In some summaries a mace takes the place of the pickaxe; in Nâzım Hikmet's play, too, Ferhad pierces the mountain with a mace of one hundred batman. This manner of death is not peculiar to the Amasya and Anatolian tale: in Samed Vurgun's play, which starts from Nizâmî, Ferhad likewise strikes his own head with the pickaxe. In Nizâmî's romance, however, Ferhad's death is silent; according to the TDV summary, crushed by the news he hears, Ferhad gives up his life at once in deep anguish. The rocks gave back that cry for a long while, and then the valley fell silent again.

The Death of Şirin

The one who carries the news to the palace is usually the same old woman. In the Culture Atlas version the old woman runs to the palace and announces that Ferhat is dead. Şirin rushes in anguish to the rocks, finds Ferhat lying lifeless and, without a moment's thought, throws herself down from the crags; her lifeless body comes to rest full length beside Ferhat. The monument in Amasya has chosen this version. In the chapbook the news is brought to Şirin by her maid Gülbeyaz; in the TDV folk tale Şirin goes straight to Ferhat, throws herself weeping on his body, draws the dagger from her sash, plunges it into her breast and falls beside him. In Demiray's account there is neither rock nor dagger: Şirin is led, as if out of her mind, to her lover's body, throws herself upon it, the tears of years and the deepening sobs at last fall still, and Şirin gives up her soul in her lover's arms.

The counterpart of this final scene in the classical romance is striking. In Nizâmî's Hüsrev ü Şîrîn, Şirin too dies by the dagger, but she does not do it for Ferhad. Hüsrev is killed by his son Şîrûye; Şîrûye tries to force Şirin to marry him, Şirin pretends to consent in order to put him off, and when Hüsrev's coffin is carried to the mausoleum she enters it alone and, embracing him at the head of the coffin, ends her life with a dagger. The folk tale took the same dagger and the same faithfulness and carried them to the side of Ferhat's body. The last embrace that belongs to Hüsrev in the romance has become Ferhat's in the people's telling.

Two Graves, Two Roses and the Thorn Bush

The story's ending comes after death. In the TDV version, when Hürmüz Şah reaches the spot with the nurse, a lion comes down from the mountain and tears the nurse apart. In the chapbook a drop of blood spurting from the nurse torn apart by the lion falls between Ferhat and Şirin. In Demiray's account the nurse is torn apart by a monster that comes down from the mountain. Hürmüz Şah holds a great funeral for the two lovers who could not be united in this world and has them buried side by side. Demiray gives this funeral a place too: amid the laments of sweet-voiced hafızes, the bodies of the two "martyrs" are carried to the top of the mountain known today as Mount Ferhat and buried side by side. The chapbook adds one more detail: Şirin's clothes are sent to Mehmene Banu, who mourns for forty days and has the clothes placed in her treasury.

The ending on which all the versions converge is a motif of spring. According to the Culture Atlas version, every spring a rose grows on each of the two graves; just as the roses are about to meet, a black thorn bush springs up between the graves and keeps them apart. In the TDV summary one rose is red and the other white, and the thorn bush that comes between them is the merciless nurse herself. In Demiray's account two saplings grow on the graves, one bearing red roses every year and the other white; when the saplings grow tall enough to reach each other, a thorny bush comes between them. Demiray interprets the image openly: the red and white roses are the pure souls of Ferhat and Şirin, and the bush is the evil spirit of the witch torn apart by the monsters. In some summaries the red rose blooms on Ferhat's grave and the white on Şirin's. The Amasya belief recorded by Hüsâmeddîn ties this grave to a real place: a large grave five meters long and two and a half meters wide, shown on top of Ferhat Rock, is held to belong to "Ferhad the Lover." Every spring the roses bloom again, and every spring the thorn bush grows again in the same place.

Variants of the Tale

The Anatolian forms of the Ferhat and Şirin story share a common skeleton: a painter-decorator, a pavilion, a woman ruler, the water beyond the mountain, the false news and two deaths. The details on this skeleton, however, change from teller to teller, from written text to oral compilation, and even within a single text. As Albayrak notes, the story underwent important changes as it passed from Ottoman court literature into folk literature, many variants arose, and its historical and geographical frame was altered, part of it being adapted to Anatolia. The Orbays' study, drawing on Murat Uraz, describes the Amasya variant as the best known of the Ferhat and Şirin stories that arose in Anatolia. The main differences can be listed as follows.

  • Şirin's identity: in the Culture Atlas compilation, in the TDV summary of the folk tale, in Nâzım Hikmet's play and on the information panel of the monument in Amasya, Şirin is the ruler's sister. In Firdevsî, Nizâmî, Nevâyî, the chapbook and Demiray's account she is Mehmene Banu's niece. In the Karagöz play she is the daughter of a merchant of Amasya and the condition is set by her mother; in Samed Vurgun's play she is the daughter of the ruler Mehin Banu. In some local accounts it is Şirin's father who demands that the mountain be pierced.
  • The names of ruler and realm: in the Culture Atlas, Mehmene Banu is directly the Sultan of Amasya. In the TDV folk tale she rules a city in Khorasan, while Amasya is the realm of Hürmüz Şah. In Nizâmî she is Mihîn Bânû, queen of the land of the Armenians; in some summaries she rules the city of Erzen in Azerbaijan, in Nâzım Hikmet she is sultan of Arzen, and in Samed Vurgun she rules Barda.
  • The name of the pierced mountain: in the TDV folk tale the first test involves Mount Bîsütun. In the Amasya version of the Culture Atlas the water lies at Elma Dağı; in Karagöz and ortaoyunu, too, the mountain Ferhat must pierce is the Elmadağı of Amasya. In the account Biryol relates it is Şahinkayası, in Demiray Şahinkaya fifteen kilometers south of Amasya, and in Nâzım Hikmet it takes the name Demirdağ, the Iron Mountain.
  • The length of time: in the TDV folk tale the first task is promised in forty days and finished in thirty-nine. The chapbook says forty days or a year, some summaries forty days or forty years. In the Amasya belief recorded by Hüsâmeddîn, Ferhat opened the canal in thirty-nine days; in the article by Gediz Urak and Işık Aksulu, however, it is written that according to folkloric sources the canal was completed in nineteen days. Nâzım Hikmet's Ferhad has been piercing the mountain for ten years and the work is still unfinished.
  • The weight and name of the pickaxe: one hundred, two hundred and three hundred batman in the chapbook, fifteen hundred and three thousand kilos in Demiray. In some summaries a mace replaces the pickaxe, while in some local accounts the tool in Ferhat's hand is called a künk, an earthenware pipe.
  • The bearer of the lie: in the Culture Atlas an old woman sent by Mehmene Banu, in the account Biryol relates a witch, in the TDV text, the chapbook and Demiray Hüsrev's nurse, in Nizâmî Hüsrev himself, in Samed Vurgun the painter Şapur, and in Karagöz a crone sent by Şirin's mother.
  • The ending: in the Amasya tales both lovers die, but Şirin's death is told in three ways, as a leap from the rock, by the dagger, or as dying of grief. In Karagöz and ortaoyunu the ending is happy; the summary on the monument's panel, by contrast, does not mention death at all, and Şirin is withheld from Ferhat even though he has brought the water. Nâzım Hikmet's play ends open.

Read together, these variants show that the story attached to Amasya consists of two distinct layers. The first layer is the long narrative of the chapbook and of Demiray; here Amasya is the last stop of an adventure that begins in Khorasan, and what ties the story to Amasya are Hürmüz Şah and Şahinkaya. The second layer is the short form in the Culture Atlas and on the monument's panel; here Khorasan, Hürmüz Şah and Prince Hüsrev have dropped out altogether, Mehmene Banu has become the Sultan of Amasya herself, and the story has turned into a tight tale of love and deceit played out between the pavilion and the canal. It is this second, simplified form that is heard at Ferhatarası beside the canal and that inspired the monument and the museum.

Through the Eyes of Folklorists

Pertev Naili Boratav counts Ferhat and Şirin among those folk tales in which, despite the mystical appearance of its heroes, love meets fate and fate prevails from the very beginning; the TDV entry records this observation. Mehmet Emin Bars, for his part, compared the chapbook text in 2014 with the fifteen "epic laws" set out for folk narratives by the Danish folklorist Axel Olrik, and concluded that the story conforms to all of them. According to Bars, the mountain-piercing motif is repeated twice in almost the same words, the number three runs through the narrative from beginning to end, and the story's most powerful tableau is the two graves side by side with the two roses above them.

Bars's most striking observation concerns the story's balance between good and evil. Hürmüz Şah stands on both sides: at first the good ruler who goes to war so that Ferhat may win his beloved, he turns, once his son comes between them, into a cruel father who sets Ferhat an impossible task. In fairy tales good triumphs in the struggle between good and evil; in this folk tale the two lovers are never united, and the wicked do not get what they want either. For Bars, every event in the story is built on separation: at each moment when the obstacles seem to have been removed, a new obstacle appears.

From Hüsrev ü Şîrîn to Ferhâd ü Şîrîn in Eastern Literature

Hüsrev and Şîrin in History

Ferhat's story was not born directly in Amasya; its roots reach back to the court of the Sasanian ruler Khosrow II Parviz (Hüsrev Perviz), who reigned from 590 to 628. According to Mustafa Erkan's entry "Hüsrev ve Şîrin" in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, legends arose already in his own lifetime about Hüsrev's splendid reign, his beloved Şîrin, his horse Şebdîz, his musicians Bârbed and Nekîsâ and his treasures. The historical sources give ample space to Hüsrev's political life but touch on his relationship with Şîrin in a few lines, and what they say about Şîrin does not agree: Tabarî calls her Hüsrev's slave girl, Mîrkhvând and Khvândamîr the slave girl of one of the Persian grandees, and some Western historians a Roman Christian girl. The Shahnameh, on the other hand, presents Şîrin as the niece of Mihîn Bânû, queen of the land of the Armenians, and Nizâmî and Nevâyî follow this line. Ferhad's historical identity is entirely unknown. His name does not appear at all in the Shahnameh or the Rawzat al-safa; according to Cemal Kurnaz's entry "Ferhad" in the TDV encyclopedia, his nationality and social station vary from poet to poet, and his one unchanging trait is that he pierces mountains for love of Şîrin.

Firdevsî and Nizâmî

The first to bring the events into a literary text was Firdevsî, who wrote the Shahnameh at the turn of the eleventh century. For Firdevsî, however, the real subject is the history of the kings of Iran; Hüsrev and Şîrin appear as an episode within that history, the weight falls on political struggles, and Ferhad is not mentioned at all. The subject was taken up with a literary purpose by Sanâ'î in the twelfth century, and its definitive form was given by Nizâmî of Ganja. According to Mehmet Kanar's entry in the TDV encyclopedia, Nizâmî spent ten years writing Hüsrev ü Şîrîn and completed it in 1180-81; its length varies between 5,700 and 7,700 couplets depending on the manuscript. With its analysis of powerful emotions of love, Nizâmî's poem became a kind of romance novel and created a genre for the imitations that followed. As Ayşe Ulusoy Tunçel relates, at the end of the work Nizâmî speaks of his love for his wife Âfâk, who had died by then, and draws a link between her and Şîrin.

In the story Nizâmî tells, Ferhad is a third figure who enters late. Hüsrev falls in love with Şîrin through pictures painted by his painter-companion Şâpûr; Şîrin in turn gives her heart to Hüsrev by gazing at his portrait, mounts her horse Şebdîz and sets out for Ctesiphon (Medâin). Long separations and Hüsrev's loveless marriage to Meryem, daughter of the Byzantine emperor, block their love. In the days when Şîrin withdraws to her pavilion at Ctesiphon, she cannot find fresh milk because there is no pasture nearby; as a remedy Şâpûr brings her Ferhad. Within a month Ferhad cuts a channel through the steep rocks and makes milk flow from distant pastures into the pool before Şîrin's pavilion. He has fallen in love with Şîrin the moment he first heard her voice; he refuses the jewels she offers and takes to the fields and mountains. Hüsrev first tries to turn his rival aside with money and riches, and when this fails he promises to keep away from Şîrin if Ferhad succeeds, demanding that he cut through Mount Bîsütun, solid hard rock from end to end, a road wide enough for an army. With every blow of his pickaxe Ferhad brings down a piece of the mountain and carves the images of Şîrin and Şebdîz on the rocks; one day, when Şîrin's horse stumbles and is about to roll over, he catches her in the air together with her horse and carries her to the pavilion. Fearing that the road will reach the far side of the mountain, Hüsrev sends him word that Şîrin is dead, and Ferhad dies of the news.

According to Kurnaz, Nizâmî's Ferhad is an engineer-architect or painter famed for building water channels; Erkan's entry presents him as a master architect renowned for building waterways in the land of Rûm, that is, in Byzantine territory. Ferhad's entry into the story as the water master of Rûm may be counted among the details that made it easier for him one day to give his name to a rock and a canal in Anatolia. The fact that the first channel Ferhad opened carried milk before water also passed into Ottoman poetry in the epithet "bennâ-yı çeşme-i şîr," the builder of the fountain of milk. According to the comparison by Könül Hacıyeva of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, Nizâmî's Şîrin is not in love with Ferhad; she merely esteems him as a hardworking artist who loves his craft.

After Nizâmî in Iran

According to Erkan, the number of those who wrote verse romances on this love in Persian literature exceeds thirty, and despite their differences all draw inspiration from Nizâmî. The first of them is Amir Khusrau of Delhi's Shirin u Khusrau of 1299; according to Hacıyeva, Dihlevî's Şîrin, unlike Nizâmî's, loves Ferhad with all her heart and gives him the strength to pierce Bîsütun, while Dihlevî's Ferhad is a gloomier, more embittered lover. Then come the Ferhâdnâme written in 1368-69 by Ârifî, a poet of Turkish origin living in Azerbaijan and Shirvan, the Ferhâd ü Şîrîn begun by Vahshi Bafqi and completed much later, around 1846, by Visal Shirazi, the Ferhâd ü Şîrîn of Urfi Shirazi and the Şîrîn ü Ferhâd of Bezmî, a poet of Shah Abbas's reign. These titles show how Ferhad gradually stepped out of Hüsrev's shadow and settled into the title of the story. The tale lived on in Iran into the twentieth century as well: a Khosrow and Shirin screenplay written in English by Zabih Behruz in 1920 was filmed and shown in Iran and other countries.

The First Hüsrev ü Şîrîn Poems in Turkish

The story entered Turkish literature in the mid-fourteenth century with the Hüsrev ü Şîrîn of 1341, translated from Nizâmî by Qutb, a poet of the Golden Horde. The first Hüsrev ü Şîrîn in Anatolia was written by Fahrî in 1367 in the name of Îsâ Bey of the Aydınoğulları; while translating Nizâmî he also drew on the Shahnameh and altered the subject in places. Erkan counts twenty-two verse romances on this subject in Turkish literature and notes that some are direct translations, while most are adaptations that acquired new and at times local elements absent from the original story; Albayrak and Şeyda Yeşilyurt, on the other hand, give the number of poets who treated the subject as twenty-one. This tendency toward localization is the literary ground on which the story would one day come down onto the rocks of Amasya.

The brightest link in this chain is the Hüsrev ü Şîrîn written by Şeyhî of Germiyan in the name of Murad II. Erkan describes it as the most beautiful and most successful Hüsrev ü Şîrîn written in Turkish. According to Halit Biltekin's entry in the TDV encyclopedia, the work of 6,944 couplets is the second Hüsrev ü Şîrîn written in Turkish literature. The biographer Sehî says that Şeyhî stripped the old Persian garment from the shoulders of the beauty of poetry and cut and dressed her in Turkish clothes and new robes of honor; Latîfî also notes that many imitations were written of the work, yet none came near Şeyhî. The poem contains twenty-six ghazals spoken by Hüsrev, Ferhad and Şîrin, a supplication in Şîrin's voice and a seven-stanza terci-i bend in Ferhad's voice. Şeyhî's Ferhad, as Erkan relates, is a fellow student in China of Hüsrev's counselor Şâvur.

Nevâyî's Ferhad

The first major work to rebuild the story around Ferhad is the Ferhâd ü Şîrîn written in Chagatai Turkish in 1484 by Ali Shir Nava'i (Ali Şîr Nevâyî). According to Günay Kut's entry in the TDV encyclopedia, the work, the second poem of his Khamsa, runs to 5,780 couplets and is written in the meter "mefâîlün mefâîlün feûlün." As Erkan relates, Nevâyî began by studying the works of Nizâmî and Dihlevî, but then changed the heart of the subject and placed Ferhad at the center instead of Hüsrev. His reasoning is clear: in a work that sings of love, the one who lives love's suffering rather than its pleasure must stand in the foreground. Nevâyî regards Hüsrev's feelings as mere whim and finds his worldly love of no account; Ferhad's love, by contrast, is a series of steps on a path that rises from platonic longing to divine love.

Nevâyî's Ferhad is no ordinary craftsman either; he is a prince of the khan of China whose road to fortune has been closed, and at the same time an architect and painter. Motifs from Eastern fairy tales, the dragon, Ahriman, the magic mirror and the breaking of talismans, enter the story, and Ferhad's adventure becomes a fairy tale in its own right. A miniature reproduced in the TDV encyclopedia, from a copy of Nevâyî's work in the Topkapı Palace, shows Ferhad being taken captive by Hüsrev. As the Orbays relate, in Ferhâd ü Şîrîn Nevâyî says that without raising a single soldier, merely by sending out his divan, he conquered all the Turkish and Turkmen lands from the Chinese border to Tabriz. Indeed, the Ferhad of Nevâyî, who never set foot in Anatolia, reached the storytellers and minstrels of Anatolia and was written into the family tree of the Ferhat told of in Amasya.

Ferhâdnâmes in the Ottoman World

After Nevâyî, most of the poets who told this love in verse romance form were Ottomans. Among the names Erkan lists are Ahmed Rıdvan, Muîdî, Sadrî, Hayâtî, Âhî and Celîlî from the reign of Bayezid II, together with Şehzade Korkut, who wrote under the pen name Harîmî. That this Amasya-born son of Bayezid II wrote a Ferhâd ü Şîrîn deserves separate mention among the ties between the story and the city. The Ferhâdnâme completed in 1512 by Lâmiî Çelebi of Bursa is, according to Albayrak, Nevâyî's work rendered into Ottoman Turkish with small differences; according to Âşık Çelebi, Selim I (Selim the Grim), who admired the work greatly, rewarded Lâmiî with the gift of a village. In the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, Ârif Çelebi wrote a Ferhâd ü Şîrîn and another poet a Ferhâdnâme; this poet's name appears as Şâmî in Albayrak's entry and as Şânî in Erkan's. In the Azerbaijani sphere a Ferhâd ü Şîrîn by Nâkâm (d. 1906) is known, and a Ferhâdnâme in Eastern Turkish by Ömer Bâkî.

Ferhad in Divan Poetry

Ferhad stepped out of the verse romances into the ghazals of Ottoman divan poetry as well and became a stock image in his own right. According to Kurnaz, in divan poetry Ferhad is the symbol of the lover who dares deeds that seem impossible for the sake of union with his beloved, yet dies in the deep anguish of his love without attaining union. His name is mentioned alongside heroes of the great love stories such as Mecnun and Vâmık, and together with Şîrin, Hüsrev, Bîsütun and the horses Şebdîz and Gülgûn; he becomes the subject of the arts of allusion, double meaning and proverbial illustration. The tulip is imagined as Ferhad's spilled blood or his kindled fire on Bîsütun. Whenever Bîsütun is mentioned, Ferhad is meant, and phrases such as "Bîsütûn-ı mihnet, Bîsütûn-ı derd, kûh-i gam, derbend-i mihnet," the Bîsütun of affliction, the mountain of grief, the pass of trial, are born of this association. The pickaxe Ferhad used to pierce the mountain is also an image; Ferhad, who split the mountain to reach Şîrin, is called "kûh-ken," the mountain-digger. Şirin became the symbol of beauty, Ferhad that of patience, steadfastness and endurance.

An Amasya example of this image appears in one of the verse stanzas Hüsâmeddîn inserted in the first volume of Amasya Tarihi as he described the city's quarters. Having described the vineyards of Çakallar and Karakaya, the stanza turns to the rock and opens: "Garbında bunun kûh-ı celî şöhre-i Ferhâd / Gûyâ eser-i aşk ile vermiş ana bünyâd." In modern English: to the west of this stands the lofty mountain that bears Ferhad's fame, as if Ferhad had raised it as a work of love. The last line of the stanza says of the same mountain "Lâkin budur u'cûbe-i ahbâr-ı Amasya," that is, yet this is the strangest of Amasya's tales. Here the Bîsütun of divan poetry has become the name of the rock west of Amasya.

Ferhat in the Folk Tale, Folk Song and Minstrel Poetry

From Verse Romance to Chapbook

Ferhat and Şirin did not stay within the verse romances; it became a folk tale under the same name. As Tunçel relates, drawing on Murat Uraz, the story of Hüsrev and Şirin first circulated among educated poets in Ottoman Turkey and from there entered popular culture. Albayrak notes that this tale was not recited to the accompaniment of the saz like folk tales of native Turkish origin, but read aloud to listeners from a written text; unlike tales such as Kerem and Aslı, its verse passages are mostly composed in the quantitative aruz meter. Its first lithograph edition appeared in Istanbul in 1854, followed by illustrated lithographs and editions in movable type. The first edition in the Latin alphabet was prepared in 1930 by Süleyman Tevfik Özzorluoğlu. As Tunçel relates, drawing on Ertop, the 1944 edition published in the series "Halk Kitapları Serisi, Saz Şairleri Hikâyeleri" was one of the cheap books easily bought from peddlers in marketplaces and mosque courtyards.

The story lived on outside Anatolia too. According to Albayrak it is also told among the Turkmens and the Taranchi Turks; its Azerbaijani variant was arranged between 1937 and 1949 by Âşık Ali Köçesgerli. The Orbays note that the story left deep traces in Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey and the Balkans. Across this wide geography the tale changed a little everywhere and everywhere attached itself to a local mountain, spring or city. According to an observation Bars cites, the story's tragic ending is one of the reasons it was so widely read and loved among the people.

In the Minstrels' Repertoire

Ferhat and Şirin found a place in the story repertoires of Eastern Anatolian âşık minstrels such as Behçet Mahir, Mevlüt İhsanî, Yaşar Reyhanî and Âşık Şenlik of Çıldır. According to an assessment Bars cites from Aslan, after the fifteenth century the ozan who sang epics gave way to the âşık who told folk tales, and in the early period the minstrels turned classical subjects of Arabic and Persian literature, such as Leyla and Mecnun, Ferhat and Şirin and Yusuf and Züleyha, into folk tales in the âşık manner. There is a minstrel inside the story as well: the chapbook's Ferhat carries a three-stringed saz, and in Demiray's account he sings his sorrow to his saz in the dungeon and in the forest. In the same account Şirin, too, sings a song; in these lines, which the Orbays render into English, Şirin says that no one has seen the soul leave the body, but that she has now seen it with her own eyes, and that the departing shadow is her own soul.

The TDV entry records that Ferhat and Şirin also became the subject of manis and folk songs. Ferhat's name has continued to be invoked in folk poetry together with the motifs of the tale of which he is the hero; according to Kurnaz he remains a source of inspiration for contemporary art and literature as well. The Lovers' Museum in Amasya carries on this tradition with a section devoted to the minstrels of Anatolia: here the words of Âşık Veysel, Karacaoğlan, Âşık Mahzuni Şerif and Dadaloğlu on love are brought to life to the sound of the plectrum.

Karagöz and Ortaoyunu

The story also passed through the traditional Turkish performing arts. In Karagöz the events are moved to the Istanbul surroundings where Hacivat and Karagöz live, shortened, and given a happy ending instead of a tragic one. On one side of Karagöz's house stands a heap of earth, and on Hacivat's side a pavilion. Hacivat explains that the pavilion belongs to Şirin, daughter of a merchant living in Amasya, and that the heap of earth is the Elmadağı that Ferhat must pierce. To give her daughter, Şirin's mother sets the condition that he pierce the Elmadağı of Amasya and bring water to the thirsting city, and Ferhat pierces the mountain with a pick given to him by Karagöz. The mother still does not want to give her daughter and sends a crone to announce that Şirin is dead; Ferhat kills the crone, and just as he is about to take his own life Şirin arrives and the two lovers attain their desire. In ortaoyunu the subject is simplified even further: the painter who will decorate Şirin's pavilion is chosen from among those who apply at Kavuklu's smithy, Ferhat pierces the Elmadağı with a pick given by Kavuklu, the crone's lie is exposed at once, and the play ends with wedding preparations.

In the Karagöz repertoire the play appears under names such as "Fasl-ı Ferhâd" or "Ferhad ile Şîrin yahut Hâin Vâlide" (Ferhad and Şîrin, or the Treacherous Mother). Its verse passages are not the same as those of the folk tale, but like them they are written mostly in aruz, and some couplets are borrowed, as the occasion suits, from Fuzûlî and other great divan poets. The version J. Gottfried Wetzstein recorded in Damascus was translated into German and published in Leipzig in 1906 as "Die Liebenden von Amasia, Ein Damascener Schattenspiel." The title is a testimony in itself: even in a shadow play performed in Damascus at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ferhat and Şirin are "the lovers of Amasya." The two lovers on the screen, there at least, were allowed to meet.

Ferhat's Places in Anatolia

Tales of the adventures of Ferhat and Şirin, in Albayrak's words, survive to this day in Anatolia, attached to certain place names, especially in Amasya and Erzurum. Bars notes that the story is both told as a tale and lives on in legendary form in almost every region of Anatolia, and that "Şirin hills and Ferhat caves" are found across Anatolia. The thinking behind these namings is plain: whenever people saw a road cut through a sheer rock, a cave, or water coming down from a mountain, they credited it to Ferhat's labor. Hüsâmeddîn records a broad geographical counterpart to this tendency: Mount Ferhat is reckoned the western beginning of the Pontic mountains, which run to Erzurum and from there into Iran, joining Bîsütun near Gilan; for this reason, he notes, some Arabic geography books call this entire range Bîsütun.

What sets Amasya apart from other Ferhat places is that the story is accompanied by a concrete, measurable work. Here Ferhat's name has been attached to a real water canal, carved into the rock, passing through the mountain in tunnels and running for kilometers. In the Orbays' words, the natural setting of the Ferhat and Şirin story is accepted among the people to be the city of Amasya, associated with this waterway.

In Modern Literature, on Stage and on Screen

From the Tanzimat to the Constitutional Era

The story reached the modern stage in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1870s a fourteen-act play titled Hüsrev ü Şîrîn was written under the initials "M. R.," probably by Mehmed Rifat of Manastır. As Tunçel relates, drawing on Özarslan, the Ferhad ile Şirin story written by Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil in 1909 was turned into a play by Mehmed Rauf. The Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov (Üzeyir Hacıbeyli) adapted the story as an opera of the same name in 1912, Ali Şeyhülislâm arranged an "Operet-i Hüsrev ü Şîrin," and the Uzbek poet and musician Hurşid Şeref Bey set Nevâyî's Ferhâd ü Şîrîn to music and turned it into an opera.

Samed Vurgun's Play

The Azerbaijani poet Samed Vurgun's verse play Ferhad and Şirin was staged in November 1941 at the Azerbaijan State Drama Theater, and performed again in Moscow in 1946 and at the Azerbaijan Russian Drama Theater in 1947. According to Tunçel's comparison, Vurgun based his play on Nizâmî's romance, but unlike Nizâmî he kept Ferhad at the center of the story from beginning to end. The play opens in Barda with the inauguration festival of a fortress built by Ferhad; Şirin is the daughter of the ruler Mehin Banu, and Hüsrev and his son Şîrûye are invaders coming from Iran. Vurgun, writing in the years of the Second World War, added love of homeland and freedom to the play. At the end Şapur tells Ferhad the lie that Şirin is dead, Ferhad strikes his own head with the pickaxe, and Şirin kills herself with a dagger.

Nâzım Hikmet's Ferhad

The best-known interpretation of the story in modern Turkish literature is the three-act play Nâzım Hikmet wrote in Bursa Prison between June and October 1948: Ferhad, Şirin, Mehmene Banu and the Water of the Demirdağ Spring. In letters cited by Tunçel, Nâzım writes to his wife Piraye that he took only a few things from the chapbook: Ferhad being a painter-decorator, Şirin being the sister of a woman ruler named Mehmene Banu, and Ferhad piercing the mountain to bring water to the pavilion built for Şirin. The rest he built himself. In the play Şirin has been ill for forty days; a poor and ugly old man who comes to the palace asks Mehmene Banu, as the price of curing her, to sacrifice the beauty of her face, and Mehmene Banu accepts for her sister's sake. Both Şirin and Mehmene Banu fall in love with Ferhad, who is working on the pavilion; Şirin throws him an apple, the two young people elope and are caught. Mehmene Banu does not punish them but sets a condition: the people of Arzen have long been dying from the polluted water that flows from the fountains, and Ferhad is to pierce Demirdağ and bring the water of the Demirdağ spring to the city.

Nâzım's Ferhad has been piercing the mountain for ten years with a mace of one hundred batman, and in that time he has forgotten his beloved's face. Mehmene Banu finally withdraws her condition; if Ferhad leaves the work and returns, the lovers will be united at once. Ferhad, however, cannot separate the work of bringing clean water to the people from his love for Şirin, and wants to finish it; Şirin is hurt at first, then agrees to wait, and the two lovers part for an indefinite time. The play therefore does not end with the tragic close of the traditional tale; it remains open: the water has not yet flowed, and the people listen with hope to the sound of Ferhad's mace. As Tunçel relates, Nâzım wrote to Piraye that he had put something of his own adventures into the play, however distantly, and told Kemal Tahir how hard it was for him to write words of love to anyone other than Piraye; the poet, waiting to be reunited with his wife, could not bring himself to kill Ferhad. The replacement of the Bîsütun of the romances by Demirdağ is, for Tunçel, a sign of the wish to make the story national, and Ferhad's words to Şirin, "you are beautiful like Turkish, Şirin," reflect the same wish. This Ferhad's pickaxe never fell, and his sound still comes from inside the mountain.

The play's world premiere took place in October 1953 at the Moscow Drama Theater under the title "A Love Tale." In Turkey it was first published by De Yayınevi in 1965 and staged the same year by the Gülriz Sururi-Engin Cezzar Theater. In later years the play was restaged many times at the Istanbul City Theaters and the Ankara and Istanbul state theaters.

The Legend of Love Ballet

Nâzım Hikmet's play also reached the world's stages as a ballet. "The Legend of Love," with music by the Azerbaijani composer Arif Melikov and choreography by Yuri Grigorovich, chief choreographer of the Bolshoi Ballet, premiered on 23 March 1961 at the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad; according to Tunçel, the ballet's libretto was also written by Nâzım Hikmet.

Rewritings

Nâzım Hikmet's play became, in Tunçel's words, a springboard for writers in Turkish theater who wished to reinterpret the story. Ümit Denizer's Ferhad ile Şirin, staged by AÇOK in the 1974-1975 season, received the İsmet Küntay Award in 1975. Yüksel Pazarkaya updated the story around xenophobia in Germany in his play Ferhat'ın Yeni Acıları (Ferhat's New Sorrows); the play is dated 1992 in some sources and 1993 in others. Hasan Kayıhan's Ferhat ile Şirin of 1992 wove the story together with everyday social and political events, Zeynep Kaçar's Böyle Bir Aşk Masalı (Such a Love Tale, 2001) told the story from Şirin's point of view, and Ertan Akman's Bir Su Masalı (A Water Tale, 2004) also joined the contemporary rewritings.

On the Big Screen and Television

The story has been brought to the cinema several times. Ferhat ile Şirin, shot in 1970 as a Turkish-Iranian co-production, was directed by the Iranian Esmail Kushan, with a screenplay by Bülent Oran and music by İsmet Nedim; in this Erler Film production Ferhat was played by Cüneyt Arkın and Şirin by Nilüfer. In 1978 Bir Aşk Masalı (A Love Tale), directed by Ejder İbrahimov and co-produced by Tuğra Film and Mosfilm, brought Nâzım Hikmet's play to the screen; Banu was played by Türkan Şoray, Ferhat by Faruk Peker and Şirin by Alla Sigalova. In the five-episode series Esir Şehrin Gözyaşları - Bir Ferhat ile Şirin Hikâyesi, broadcast on FOX in 2012, the leading roles were shared by Yiğit Özşener and Sedef Avcı.

Traces in Amasya

The Ferhat Water Canal

The waterway Ferhat is said to have opened by piercing the mountain is, according to the documentation study published in 2006 by Gediz Urak and Işık Aksulu, a canal built between the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman periods to meet the water needs of ancient Amaseia. It was cut into the local limestone with iron chisels, carried through the mountain in tunnels where necessary, and plastered inside with Khorasan mortar; a Greek inscription in the wall of the Yörgüç Paşa Mosque records that the waterways were repaired in the third century AD, and the canal went out of use around the twelfth century. The roughly 675-meter section at Ferhatarası was cleared in 1997 in an excavation by the Amasya Museum. The total length of the canal is given in the sources as anything from six kilometers to eighteen and twenty-five kilometers. The canal's route, building technique and excavation finds are described in detail in the article on the Ferhat Water Canal.

Ferhat Rock and the Giant Grave

Hüsâmeddîn describes the story's setting in Amasya with a historian's eye. The high, sheer rock southwest of Karakaya is called Ferhat Rock, the ridge stretching east from it Mount Ferhat, and the places where the rock meets the city's southwestern gorge Ferhatarası. On the west-facing foot of the rock, which rises some three hundred meters from the ground, an arch-shaped cavity can be seen about three meters up; in Hüsâmeddîn's words this cavity looks as fresh as if it had been carved yesterday. It is on this cavity that the legend rests. According to Hüsâmeddîn, the people believe that while Ferhat was opening that great, long waterway in thirty-nine days to win Şirin, he pierced this rock that stood in his path out of love, and that the rock took its name from this; the historian reports each claim with exclamation marks.

Part of the same legend is the grave on top of the rock. According to Hüsâmeddîn, to lend this tale strength, the grave five meters long and some two and a half meters wide shown on top of Ferhat Rock was attributed to Ferhad the Lover, and it was claimed that people in olden times were very tall. Hüsâmeddîn also writes that the Amasya historian Kara Müftüzâde Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi examined this question in his own history and concluded that the rock was pierced by Ferhad, the lover of Şirin, but that in this view he was probably mistaken. The symbolic grave in the garden of today's Lovers' Museum is a kind of present-day counterpart to this old grave shown on top of Ferhat Rock for centuries.

The Ferhat and Şirin Monument

The story's most visible monument in the city is the Ferhat and Şirin Monument, set up on a rocky summit of Mount Ferhat. The idea of such a statue actually goes back to the conservation project of 1997-98: according to the article by Urak and Aksulu, the head of the canal, which serves as the city's gateway, was to be crowned with a sculpture keeping the Ferhat and Şirin legend alive. The two bronze figures are about five meters tall and were in place by December 2012. According to a news item from Amasya Municipality, the then mayor Cafer Özdemir said they had commissioned the five-meter statues on the mountain where Ferhat dug the canal set as the condition for winning Şirin, and noted that the statue had drawn mostly positive but also some negative reactions. The name of the artist who made the monument was not found in the sources we read.

The monument gathers two separate moments of the story into a single scene. Ferhat is shown with his pickaxe in one hand, and Şirin about to let herself fall from the edge of the summit; in Özdemir's words, the statues symbolize Şirin throwing herself from the rock on being told that Ferhat was dead, and Ferhat hurling his pickaxe into the air and taking his own life. The monument's information panel, however, summarizes the story quite differently: Ferhat fulfilled a demand beyond human strength and succeeded in bringing water to the city by piercing the mountains, yet the Sultan of Amasya still would not give him her sister; Ferhat could not be united with Şirin, nor Şirin with Ferhat. This summary does not mention the false news or the deaths, and foregrounds a betrayal in which the word was not kept even though the condition was fulfilled. The summit on which the monument stands is a viewpoint for those who want to see the city from above; from here the Yeşilırmak cutting through the valley, the Yalıboyu houses and the rock tombs on the opposite slope can be taken in at a single glance. The bronze Şirin stands at the same edge every evening, yet no evening does she fall.

The Ferhat and Şirin Lovers' Museum

Foremost among the places that keep the legend alive in today's Amasya is the Ferhat and Şirin Lovers' Museum, located on the Ferhatarası section of the canal. According to the Orbays' study, the project prepared by Amasya Municipality in 2011 and supported by the Central Black Sea Development Agency was realized at the end of 2013 on the site where the story is said to have taken place. In a statement to an Anadolu Agency reporter on 20 November 2012, Özdemir said that because there was private property around the canal, factories and waste had stood there, that they had first expropriated the site, that the development agency was covering thirty-eight percent of the project, and that the project would cost about 2.5 million lira; the work began with the approval of the High Council of Monuments. The expropriated area is 8.5 dönüm, and the museum was placed underground so as not to block the view of the canal. According to Özdemir's statement, the museum is a tunnel-shaped structure sixty meters long and eight meters wide, made up of eight separate halls. The museum is reported to have opened in 2013; some promotional materials give its opening as Valentine's Day 2014.

The museum's content is not confined to a single legend. In its sections, alongside Ferhat and Şirin, the stories of Kerem and Aslı, Leyla and Mecnun, Mimar Sinan and Mihrimah Sultan, and Romeo and Juliet are presented with three- and two-dimensional silicone models, statues, reliefs, period sets, and light and music effects. After sections devoted to the minstrels of Anatolia and the culture of betrothal, the tour ends with a section on divine love as voiced by Rumi (Mevlânâ), Yunus Emre and Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî. In 2018 Deputy Mayor Osman Akbaş said they had chosen the museum's name because they believed the legend took place in Amasya. At the center of the museum is a wedding hall, and the site is one of the places brides and grooms often choose for outdoor photographs. In the garden stand symbolic graves of Ferhat and Şirin.

Visitor numbers show the interest, but they also reveal its limits. According to figures the Orbays obtained from the municipality, the museum was visited by 25,265 people in 2014, 29,523 in 2015, 32,299 in 2016, 76,505 in 2017, 71,727 in 2018 and 71,433 in 2019. In surveys cited in the same study, only 3.8 percent of domestic tourists coming to Amasya named the museum as the first place they wanted to visit, and 5.3 percent of people who had never visited Amasya thought first of Ferhat and Şirin when the city was mentioned.

The City's Other Lovers Who Never Met

Hüsâmeddîn's own records show that Ferhat and Şirin do not stand alone in Amasya's memory. One of the biographies in the ninth volume of Amasya Tarihi is the story of Hatibzâde Hulûsî Mehmed Efendi. Hulûsî Efendi lost his heart to the daughter of the bookseller Gürcü Mehmed Emin Efendi, the girl was taken with him in turn, and a passionate love grew between them. According to Hüsâmeddîn's account, because of the mother's stubbornness and the father's pride, and despite Hacı Emin Efendi's consent, the two young people cannot be united and fall ill with the pain of separation. Deeply grieved by his beloved's death, Hulûsî Efendi takes leave of life forty days later in profound sorrow. The two are buried side by side at the pleasure ground called Kaşukpınarı above the Kübceğiz quarter; Hüsâmeddîn writes that this love affair is very famous in Amasya. The name of the Aynalı Mağara (Mirrored Cave), one of the city's rock tombs, is likewise tied to the story of the Beautiful Maiden who died together with the young man who lifted her veil. In Amasya, it seems, lovers who never met are always buried side by side.

Legend and History

The harshest critic of the tradition linking the story to the canal is Hüsâmeddîn. In his view the tale is a superstition, and the "Ferhad and Şîrin" fable is in any case an imaginary romance. Following the cavity at Ferhatarası in both directions, the historian writes that it is a waterway some eighteen kilometers long that begins at Şâhin Kayası, winds through the city's quarters and ends south of the Kibrithane, and that the thick lime deposits inside it show the water flowed for centuries. The historian reasons as follows: not even the lime used in these waterways over a distance of three hours' walk could have been burned in thirty-nine days; a single Ferhad could not have done this work alone in thirty-nine days, nor even in thirty-nine years; and attributing great works carved into the rock in tunnel form in four or five places to a single man is naive. Whoever built these waterways must have commanded very great political and financial power; considering the waterways that the Kâmûsü'l-A'lâm says the Pontic king Mithridates built at Zile, the structure may have been built by Mithridates or his ancestors.

Hüsâmeddîn also sets out a series of possibilities as to where the rock got the name Ferhat. According to the first, the love of "Kisrâ and Şîrin" was transformed over time into the love of "Ferhad and Şîrin"; Kisrâ is the Persian shah Hüsrev Perviz, and Şîrin, in his view, is Maria, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Maurice, whose likenesses are carved on Mount Bîsütun in Iran. That the word Bîsütun was corrupted from Pontus, and that Amasya lies at the foot of the Pontic mountains, may have given rise to this tale. The second possibility comes from a historical periodical of unknown author and date: when Hüsrev Perviz invaded Asia Minor and seized Amasya, he appointed one of his commanders, Ferhâd son of Efrûhte, governor of the region; this governor repaired the waterways, and the rock took his name. In another passage of the first volume of Amasya Tarihi the same information is given somewhat differently: when the Persians invaded Amasya, a commander named Efrûhte was appointed governor of Pontus, and his son Ferhâd later became governor of Amasya. Hüsâmeddîn finds this doubtful; since Amasya returned to Byzantine hands for some four hundred and seventy years after the invasion, it does not seem plausible to him that the name of a Persian commander should have survived until the Turkish conquest. The third possibility rests on the Târîh-i Âl-i Dânişmend: when Melik Ahmed Danişmend Gazi besieged Harşena around 1074-75, one of his commanders, Ferhâd Gazi, was charged with crossing the Fon mountain from Helvacı Pınarı and descending on the city from the south; he fell in battle and was buried there. According to Hüsâmeddîn, the strange grave on the mountain must be the grave of this Danishmendid commander, later enlarged and attributed to Ferhad the Lover.

None of these explanations has become certain, and some conflict with other sources. Hüsâmeddîn's identification of Şîrin with Maurice's daughter Maria does not fit the literary tradition: in Nizâmî and the romances that follow him, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor whom Hüsrev marries is Meryem, and Şîrin is a different woman, distinct from her, who comes from the land of the Armenians. The historical sources, meanwhile, call Şîrin sometimes a slave girl, sometimes a Roman Christian girl. The thirty-nine-day span of the tale also varies from source to source; the article by Urak and Aksulu states that according to folkloric sources the canal was opened in nineteen days. Hüsâmeddîn's basic finding, however, has been confirmed by later research: the finds of the 1997 excavation showed that the canal belongs to the Hellenistic and Roman periods and that the Ferhat name's connection to the story has no scholarly basis. According to Urak and Aksulu, the source of the tradition is most probably that the rock and mountain on which the canal lies bear the name Ferhat.

There is no firm document showing when the legend was tied to the canal, but some clues point to the age of this bond. The view of Kara Müftüzâde Vâzıh Efendi, who attributed the rock to Ferhad the lover, belongs to a local history written before Hüsâmeddîn. The Karagöz play's having Ferhat pierce the Elmadağı of Amasya matches the Amasya tale in the Culture Atlas, in which the water lies at Elma Dağı; and the title of the Damascus shadow play published by Wetzstein in 1906 is "The Lovers of Amasya." These testimonies suggest that the attachment of Ferhat and Şirin to Amasya did not remain a merely local belief, but was established knowledge in the performing arts of the Ottoman world by the beginning of the twentieth century at the latest. The canal belongs to the kings of Pontus, the rock to Ferhat; Amasya has given up neither.

On the Meaning of the Story

The assessments in this section are the Amasya05 Editorial Board's own reading and are offered as an interpretation based on the sources above. In our view, what first distinguishes the Amasya branch of Ferhat and Şirin from other love stories is labor. In Leyla and Mecnun the lover wanders into the desert, in Kerem and Aslı onto the roads; Ferhat, however, is a worker. He is a painter-decorator, an architect, a water master; he speaks his love with the pickaxe, with ornament, with a road cut through rock. The one who opens the milk channel in Nizâmî, splits the mountain in Nevâyî, and lifts the pickaxe of a hundred batman in the chapbook is always the same labor of the hand. For this reason the people of Amasya's attribution of an ancient waterway to a lover should not be dismissed as a simple historical error. The road that forgotten stonecutters carved into the rock centuries ago has turned, in popular memory, into the work of one man done alone, with love and with stubbornness. Hüsâmeddîn rightly says that this work could not have been done without a ruler's wealth; the people, for their part, chose to credit that labor to love.

The second layer is the symbolism of water and mountain. Şirin's name means sweet, and what the story seeks is sweet water: milk in Nizâmî, the stream to flow before the pavilion in the folk tale, the water to be brought to the thirsting city in the Amasya tale, the clean water to reach a people dying from polluted fountains in Nâzım Hikmet. The mountain is first an insurmountable obstacle and then is overcome; but in the story the winner is never the mountain. Ferhat defeats the mountain every time, and what defeats him is a plate of fritters in an old woman's hands and a lie of two sentences. The fate Boratav identified works in this story through a word. That the lie is believed so easily is also the measure of Ferhat's love: the thought of a world without Şirin weighs on him more heavily than a mountain.

The third layer is the persistence of separation beyond death. The two graves lie side by side, the two roses bloom anew each spring, and the thorn bush comes between them anew each spring. This ending, rather than closing the story, binds it to the cycle of nature: failing to be united ceases to be a misfortune lived once and over, and becomes a condition seen again every spring. In Demiray's interpretation the roses are the pure souls of the two lovers and the bush the witch's evil spirit; in our view the power of the image lies in showing evil, too, like love, as something that does not end with death.

The women of the story carry their own weight as well. Mehmene Banu is a jealous sultan in some versions, and in Nâzım Hikmet a tragic heroine who sacrifices the beauty of her face for her sister and in the end withdraws her condition. Şirin, in almost all the versions, is the one who makes the final decision: she leaps from the rock, draws the dagger herself, or herself surrenders her soul in her lover's arms. Nâzım's Şirin proposes that Ferhad elope with her, and Zeynep Kaçar's play tells the whole story through her eyes. Şirin's faithfulness is as much a load-bearing pillar of the story as Ferhat's labor.

Finally, on the story's place in Amasya's identity. Amasya is a city founded on water in the valley of the Yeşilırmak, a city that brought its water down from the mountains through channels, fountains and endowed waterways; Hüsâmeddîn's pages are full of the benefactors of these waterways, from the Kaya Paşa Water to the Acem Ali Water. It is no surprise that such a city's best-loved love story should also be a story of bringing water. The tale Hüsâmeddîn called "the strangest of Amasya's tales" has become the story told today by the rock at the city's entrance, the museum and the monument on the hilltop. History ties the canal to Pontus, literature ties Ferhat to Ganja and Herat; Amasya has brought the two together on the same rock. Ferhat's pickaxe fell only once, and the story has stood upright on the mountain ever since.

Chronology

2nd century BC: The building technique of the Ferhat Water Canal resembles that of the period of the King Rock Tombs; the canal is thought to have been built between the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman periods.

590-628: The Sasanian ruler Khosrow II Parviz reigns; legends about his love for Şîrin arise already in this period.

3rd century AD: According to the Greek inscription in the wall of the Yörgüç Paşa Mosque, the waterways are repaired.

10th-11th century: Firdevsî includes the story of Hüsrev and Şîrin in the Shahnameh; Ferhad does not yet appear.

1074-75: According to the Târîh-i Âl-i Dânişmend, Ferhâd Gazi falls on the Fon mountain during Melik Ahmed Danişmend Gazi's siege of Harşena.

12th century: The canal goes out of use in the late Byzantine period.

1180-81: Nizâmî of Ganja completes Hüsrev ü Şîrîn; Ferhad enters the story.

1299: Amir Khusrau of Delhi writes Shirin u Khusrau.

1341: Qutb translates Nizâmî's work into Turkish.

1367: Fahrî writes the first Anatolian Hüsrev ü Şîrîn in the name of Îsâ Bey of the Aydınoğulları.

1484: Ali Shir Nava'i writes Ferhâd ü Şîrîn and places Ferhad at the center of the story.

1512: Lâmiî Çelebi completes his Ferhâdnâme.

1854: The first lithograph edition of the Ferhat and Şirin folk tale appears in Istanbul.

1870s: The fourteen-act play Hüsrev ü Şîrîn is written under the initials "M. R."

1906: The Karagöz play recorded by Wetzstein in Damascus is published in German as "Die Liebenden von Amasia."

1909: Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil writes his Ferhad ile Şirin story.

1912: Uzeyir Hajibeyov adapts the story as an opera.

1930: The first Latin-alphabet edition of the tale is published by Süleyman Tevfik Özzorluoğlu.

1941: Samed Vurgun's play Ferhad and Şirin is staged in Baku.

1948: Nâzım Hikmet writes his play in Bursa Prison.

1953: Nâzım Hikmet's play is staged in Moscow under the title "A Love Tale."

1954: A. Demiray's Resimli Amasya publishes the long Amasya version of the story.

1961: Arif Melikov's ballet "The Legend of Love" premieres at the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad.

1965: Nâzım Hikmet's play is published in Turkey and staged by the Gülriz Sururi-Engin Cezzar Theater.

1970: The Turkish-Iranian co-production Ferhat ile Şirin, starring Cüneyt Arkın and Nilüfer, is filmed.

1978: Bir Aşk Masalı, adapted from Nâzım Hikmet's play, is filmed.

1997-98: A clearance excavation is carried out on the Ferhatarası section, and a conservation and landscaping project is prepared.

2011: Amasya Municipality prepares the project that includes the Lovers' Museum.

2012: The Ferhat and Şirin Monument is set up on Mount Ferhat by December; the series Esir Şehrin Gözyaşları - Bir Ferhat ile Şirin Hikâyesi is broadcast.

2013: The Ferhat and Şirin Lovers' Museum opens.

2017: The museum's annual visitor count reaches its highest level at 76,505.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources