Gevherî was a folk poet who rose to fame in the second half of the seventeenth century and is counted, together with Karacaoğlan and Âşık Ömer, among the most widely read minstrel poets (saz şairi) of that century. His poems in syllabic metre and in aruz (quantitative metre) were scattered through cönks and poetry miscellanies (mecmua) in Anatolia, Rumelia and Azerbaijan, and Şükrü Elçin's Gevherî Divanı, published in 1984, brings together 979 poems including variants. His birthplace, his real name and the date of his death are still disputed. His link with Amasya comes from a short article by the historian Nihad M. Çetin, a native of Gümüşhacıköy, which rests on family memory. This link has not been confirmed by any other source and is treated with caution in both encyclopedia entries devoted to the poet.

His Life

Where Gevherî was born is not known. M. Fuad Köprülü, starting from a poem of praise the poet wrote for the Crimean Khan Selim Giray, considered him a Crimean, while Şükrü Elçin and Saim Sakaoğlu found it more likely that he was from Istanbul. Ali Berat Alptekin also writes that the Istanbul view is generally accepted and adds a record from a hagiography by Hoca Emin: in a tavern in the Fener quarter of Istanbul, Âşık Ömer and Gevherî are said to have recited couplets to one another while scribes wrote them down. The common opinion places his birth towards the end of the first half of the seventeenth century; M. Şakir Ülkütaşır, taking him to be a contemporary of the minstrel Kâtibî, moved it back to the first quarter of the century, while Hikmet Dizdaroğlu argued for a later date.

Three different names have also been proposed as the poet's real name. Köprülü inferred from a quatrain containing the pen name (mahlas) that he was called Mustafa, Orhan Yavuz put forward the name Ali on the basis of another text, and Elçin proposed Mehmed. Sakaoğlu states firmly that the name was Mehmed. Alptekin reminds the reader that these quatrains were multiplied by copyists after the poet's death and sometimes underwent additions and changes, and he notes that the lines containing the names Mustafa and Ali are identical apart from small differences. The two quatrains in which a name appears are given on separate pages in this category, with the original text, a modern rendering and commentary.

According to the generally accepted view, Gevherî served as divan secretary to Mehmed Bahri Pasha, a poet and calligrapher who lived through the reigns from Mehmed IV to Mustafa II, and in this post spent some time in Damascus and Baghdad. According to Müstakimzâde, Bahri Pasha died in Istanbul in 1112 (1700). The poet evidently received a good madrasa education and spent most of his life in Istanbul; his poems show that he was no wandering minstrel and left the city only from time to time on official business. Cahit Öztelli, relying on two of his poems, thought that he took part in the Austrian campaigns of 1663 and 1683, whereas Nurettin Albayrak found it more plausible that these poems were wishes for the campaigns' success composed in Istanbul. According to İbrâhim Naîmüddin's Hadîkatü'ş-şühedâ, dated 1157 (1744), Gevherî was in Eger when his grandfather Ahmed Ağa, alay bey (regimental commander) of the fortress of Eger, fell as a martyr, and wrote an elegy for him.

The date of his death is not certain either. Köprülü, starting from the date 1127 found in a koşma he believed to have been written in the poet's last years, holds that he died shortly after 1715. Dizdaroğlu found the date 1150 in the last stanza of the same poem in another cönk and placed the death after 1737. Taken together with the early dates proposed for his birth, these dates would give the poet a life of a hundred years or more. Albayrak does not find this very likely and writes that the most reasonable course is to accept that the poet was born towards the end of the first half of the seventeenth century and died shortly after the reign of Ahmed III (1703-1730). Alptekin likewise notes that all views on the place and date of his death remain conjecture.

All the information connecting Gevherî with Amasya rests on Nihad M. Çetin's article "Gevherî'ye Dâir Birkaç Not", published in 1991 in a volume presented to Bekir Kütükoğlu. According to Çetin, Gevherî served as superintendent (emin) of the silver mine at the town of Gümüş in the Amasya region. The poet's mansion, known as the "Saray", stood in Gümüşhacıköy until recent times. Çetin's maternal grandfather, Gevherîzâde Abdülvehhâb Efendi, was the poet's grandson. Çetin asserts that the poet's name was definitely Mustafa; he relates that the divan passed to his grandfather and was later sold in Sivas. Relying on his grandfather's oral account, he also writes that Gevherî and his son Ahmed Efendi are buried in the graveyard of the Tomb of Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî in Merzifon. The article publishes impressions of three seals; on one of them the name "Gevherî" and the date 1260 (1844) can be read.

Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar's Amasya Tarihi has no entry under the name Gevherî; in the volumes we searched, including the sections that list the scholars of Gümüş and Merzifon at length, this pen name does not occur. Nor, as far as Albayrak reports, do the views of Köprülü, Elçin and Sakaoğlu on Gevherî mention Amasya. The claim thus rests on the family tradition and oral information of a single researcher. The site's article on the spiritual figures and historic tombs of Gümüşhacıköy also mentions Gevherî on the basis of this record.

The Position of the Sources

Nurettin Albayrak, author of the entry in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, is cautious after reporting Çetin's information. In his view, the seal bearing the date 1260 cannot belong to Gevherî, who is accepted to have died in the first half of the eighteenth century, and this new information is such as to suggest the existence of a second Gevherî. Ali Berat Alptekin, author of the entry in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, says that, judging by the seals, Gevherî was from Amasya, but he adds that it has not yet been settled whether the person Çetin speaks of is a second minstrel using the same pen name or the famous Gevherî himself. Both encyclopedias record the claim; neither adopts it as established fact.

The reasons for doubt can be set out as follows. Çetin's information rests on family memory and on his grandfather's oral account; no independent document showing the existence of the mansion, the divan or the grave has been published. The only one of the published seals whose date can be read belongs to 1844, at least a century after the death of the known poet. Gevherî's life as documented in the sources unfolds around his secretaryship to Mehmed Bahri Pasha, Istanbul, Damascus, Baghdad and Eger; a mine superintendency appears in none of these records. Nor do the sources available to us point to any poem by Gevherî that mentions Amasya, Merzifon or Gümüş. Our own assessment is this: the Gevherîzâde family of Gümüş may have had an ancestor who wrote poetry under the pen name Gevherî in the nineteenth century or used that name on his seal; that this person was the same as the famous minstrel poet of the seventeenth century has not been documented.

His Poetry

Gevherî's poems were read with affection over a wide area from the second half of the seventeenth century to the early twentieth. No divan compiled by the poet himself has survived. The main sources of his poems are the Mecmûa-i Eş'âr-ı Gevherî, found by Vasfi Mahir Kocatürk in the Çorum Provincial Public Library and containing only Gevherî's poems, a miscellany dated 1130 (1718) in İnebey, Bursa, the Şükrü Fılat miscellany, and dozens of cönks in libraries in Ankara, London and Istanbul. Hasan Eren reported some 300 poems by Gevherî in a single cönk. The work of collection, begun by Sadettin Nüzhet Ergun in 1928, continued with the books of Köprülü, Mehmed Halid Bayrı and Elçin, and in 1995 Burhan Kaçar produced a textual analysis of the divan as a doctoral thesis. According to Alptekin, Gevherî is the minstrel poet with the largest known body of poems after Âşık Ömer.

His poems in syllabic metre are mostly eight-syllable semais and eleven-syllable koşmas; in aruz he also wrote ghazals (gazel), divan, kalenderî, semai and müstezat. Because of his madrasa education and the influence of divan poetry, his language is heavier than that of his fellow minstrels and often uses Arabic and Persian compounds. Albayrak says that the subtleties of folk Turkish appear in his koşmas and semais, while his poems in aruz do not show the same richness. Köprülü drew attention to faults arising from fast and easy composition, weak rhymes, lapses of caesura and metre, and the repetition of the same themes, and noted that these weaknesses gave divan poets grounds to look down on folk poetry. Even so, Gevherî was regarded as a master by many minstrels who came after him.

The main theme of his poetry is love; the beloved, the rival, separation, fate and suffering revolve around this theme. He touches on social matters only in a few poems and, like Karacaoğlan, shows little interest in Sufi themes. His closeness to music is well known; Alptekin mentions a musical mode (makam) bearing the name "Gevherî". Some of his poems entered the repertoire of classical Turkish music and folk music. The best known are "Elâ gözlü nazlı dilber", set by Alâeddin Yavaşça in the mâhur mode, and "Ey benim nazlı cânânım", set by Ahmet Çağan in the rast mode.

Family and Circle

The only documented information about Gevherî's family is the martyrdom of his grandfather Ahmed Ağa, alay bey of the fortress of Eger, and the elegy the poet wrote for him. His patron and master Mehmed Bahri Pasha was a statesman, poet and calligrapher who lived under four sultans, from Mehmed IV to Mustafa II. The son Ahmed Efendi and the Gevherîzâde line living in Gümüş, of whom Çetin speaks, belong to the disputed family tradition described above and have not been confirmed by any other source.

Chronology

1112 (1700): Mehmed Bahri Pasha, whose divan secretary Gevherî was, dies in Istanbul.

1127 (1715): The date in the koşma that Köprülü placed in the poet's last years.

1130 (1718): Date of the İnebey (Bursa) miscellany consisting mostly of Gevherî's poems.

1150 (1737): The date Dizdaroğlu read in another copy of the same poem.

1157 (1744): The Hadîkatü'ş-şühedâ, which records that Gevherî wrote an elegy for his grandfather at Eger, is composed.

1260 (1844): Date of the seal bearing the name "Gevherî" published by Nihad Çetin.

1984: Şükrü Elçin's Gevherî Divanı, containing 979 poems, is published.

1991: Nihad M. Çetin publishes "Gevherî'ye Dâir Birkaç Not", which connects Gevherî with Gümüş and Merzifon.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Şükrü Elçin, Gevherî Divanı: İnceleme-Metin-Dizin-Bibliyografya, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Millî Folklor Araştırma Dairesi Yayınları, 1984 (as cited by Albayrak 1996 and Alptekin 2015).
  • Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vols. 1-12, Amasya: Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları (e-book; searched to establish that there is no entry for Gevherî). https://amasya.bel.tr/uploads/e-kitap/kitap/6-8/files/basic-html/page1.html

Academic studies

Books

  • Ali Berat Alptekin, "Gevherî", Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, 13.04.2015 (updated 07.12.2020). https://teis.yesevi.edu.tr/madde-detay/gevheri
  • Nihad M. Çetin, "Gevherî'ye Dâir Birkaç Not", Prof. Dr. Bekir Kütükoğlu'na Armağan, Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1991, pp. 21-23 (as cited by Albayrak 1996 and Alptekin 2015).
  • M. Fuad Köprülü, Türk Saz Şairleri II: Gevherî, Âşık Ömer, Karacaoğlan, Ankara: Millî Kültür Yayınları, 1962, pp. 191-249 (as cited by Albayrak 1996).

Online sources