Fethî is a local poet with five syllabic koşmas in the Merzifon Cönkü, a manuscript compiled in Merzifon. Two of his koşmas address a beauty named Gülfadik in "Şehr-i Merzifon", the town of Merzifon. Metin Hakverdioğlu, who keeps the cönk in his own library, believes that Fethî was a Merzifon poet and that it is highly likely he was the one who compiled the cönk. No record has been found of his real name, the years in which he lived, his occupation or his family; what we know consists of the five opening quatrains in the cönk and the conclusions Hakverdioğlu draws from them. Hakverdioğlu counts him, together with Serbesî, among the "unheard-of local poets".

The Merzifon Cönkü and Its Compiler

The Merzifon Cönkü is a long, narrow poetry notebook measuring 10.5 x 25 cm, written in a ta'lik hand and numbered to 112 pages. Its compiler and date of copying are not written in it, and the first page and several pages at the end are missing. Hakverdioğlu estimates it to be about a hundred years old. It contains 161 poems by 32 poets, 98 in aruz and 63 in syllabic metre. Alongside semais, divanîs and kalenderîs composed in aruz by folk poets, the notebook also includes ghazals by a divan poet such as Bâkî. The poet with the most poems is Tokatlı Nûrî, with 36.

Hakverdioğlu's reasons for connecting the notebook with Fethî can be gathered under a few points. According to the bookseller from whom it was bought, the notebook came from Merzifon. Two of Fethî's koşmas speak of Gülfadik, a beauty of Merzifon. The notebook devotes a separate section of ghazals to Eyüp Sabrî, a member of the well-known Taşan family of Merzifon; according to Orhan Bilgin, Sabrî often invited Tokatlı Nûrî to Merzifon and engaged with him in conversation and poetic contests. Finally, the spelling of the notebook is free of errors, which suggests that its writer was someone well versed in divan poetry. On these grounds Hakverdioğlu concludes that the notebook was put together by a Merzifon poet of Sabrî's literary circle and considers it highly likely that this poet was Fethî. In his own words this is a conjecture; nothing in the notebook gives the compiler's name.

His Connection with Amasya

Among the poets of the Merzifon Cönkü, Fethî is one of those whose connection with Amasya is most concrete. The line "Şehr-i Merzifonda civân Gülfadik", young Gülfadik of the town of Merzifon, clearly shows that the poet was addressing a beauty living in Merzifon and places him in the life of the town. The literary setting Hakverdioğlu describes completes this link: Merzifon was a town on the roads to Çorum, Kastamonu, Sinop and Samsun and a regular halt for folk poets; names such as Dertli, Emrah, Nûrî and Âşık Ömer came there at the invitation of local poets like Eyüp Sabrî. Fethî can be imagined as a local lover of poetry and a poet himself, who copied into a notebook the poems he heard and liked in these gatherings together with his own koşmas. Nevertheless, no document proves that he was born or died in Merzifon.

Poets of the Same Pen Name

The pen name Fethî was also used by other Ottoman poets. In the twelfth volume of Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi it is recorded that Ahmed Fethî Efendi, son of Güvenzâde Abdullah Efendi, a preacher in Amasya who died after 1112 (1700-01), was "of the ulema and the poets", that is, a scholar and a poet. The lifetime of this Fethî of Amasya falls in the early eighteenth century; it seems difficult in terms of date for him to be the author of koşmas in a cönk estimated to be about a hundred years old and filled with the poems of nineteenth-century minstrels. The Fethî with an entry in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü is a seventeenth-century divan poet from Sofia, a pupil of Güftî, with no known connection to Merzifon. There is no evidence that would allow the Fethî of the cönk to be identified with either of these two poets.

His Poetry

Fethî has five syllabic koşmas in the cönk, all in the eleven-syllable koşma form. The article gives only the first quatrain of each; the full texts are in the cönk, on pages 92, 112, 113, 114 and 115. The first koşma begins "Bir lebleri ra‘nâ geldi yanıma" and speaks of a beloved who leaves her ring as a keepsake. The second and fifth koşmas have the refrain Gülfadik: one opens with the line "‘Arż-ı ḥâlim yâre bir bir söylesem", the other with "Zeytun gözleriňe ḳurbân olayım", and both repeat the name of the Merzifon beauty at the end of each stanza. The third koşma begins with the line "Ziynet-i dünyâya meyil mi virem" and is a poem of counsel likening the world to a faithless lover. The fourth begins "Âteş-i ‘aşḳıyla yanıp aġlarken" and compares the tears of a lover burning in the fire of love to the river Ceyhun. The frequent use of Persian compounds such as "ziynet-i dünyâ", "nehr-i Ceyhûn" and "arz-ı hâl" in the koşmas fits Hakverdioğlu's observation about the compiler's closeness to divan poetry. Each of the five koşmas is given on a separate poem page in the poet's category.

The State of the Sources and Discussion

The only source for what is known about Fethî is Hakverdioğlu's article of 2019. That Fethî was from Merzifon rests on two of his koşmas addressing a Merzifon beauty and is strong circumstantial evidence. That he compiled the cönk is a view Hakverdioğlu presents with the words "we conjecture" and "the likelihood is high". The correct spelling and the closeness to divan poetry on which this view rests say something about the compiler; that the compiler was Fethî is supported only by the koşmas addressed to Merzifon. When the full text of the cönk is published, the pen-name stanzas of Fethî's koşmas and the arrangement of the notebook, for example the fact that his poems are gathered towards its end, may give a firmer answer to this question.

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