"Kaleden atılır kandilli fişek": the song's first line seems to describe the night sky over a town. Zekeriya Demiray, who sang it for the conservatory team in Amasya on 4 July 1943, was neither an instrumentalist nor a minstrel but, according to the list of performers, the head of a village office. The date of the recording is written clearly on the card, while the place was completed by the cataloguer. The rest of the song's words and its notation appear in no publication; the TRT repertoire did not include it among the folk songs of Amasya either.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none
  • Source person: Zekeriya Demiray; head of a village office, from central Amasya, year of birth on the card 1323 in the Rumi calendar (1907-1908); he used no instrument in his recordings
  • Date of collection: 4 July 1943
  • Place of collection: Amasya (in square brackets in the catalogue)
  • Collected by: Halil Bedii Yönetken and Muzaffer Sarısözen; technician Rıza Yetişen
  • Genre: folk song (türkü)
  • Mode, rhythm: not recorded
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive of the Ankara State Conservatory, disc 1105/B-2
  • Source publication: Kaya's catalogue, no. 3576; the thesis's online record; there is no TRT link

Lyrics

Only one line, transferred from the card, survives:

Kaleden atılır kandilli fişek

A "kandilli fişek" is a flare that gives off light when fired into the air, burning like an oil lamp. The line is understood as "Flares are fired from the castle." Whether the flares are fired for a celebration or as a signal, and whether the castle is that of Amasya or another, cannot be drawn from the line; nor is it known whether the song's later words tie this scene to a love or to exile. For the rest of the words two places remain: the TRT copy of the card and the disc. The disc is at the State Conservatory of Hacettepe University, the present holder of the former conservatory archive; in 2014 the archive was closed to researchers.

Story

The archive holds other songs beginning with "Kaleden", from the castle, but none opens with these words: the pieces recorded in Malatya and Bayburt in 1937, in Nevşehir in 1941 and in Muş in 1944 carry the line "Kaleden kaleye şahin uçurdum", and titles such as "Kaleden İndim" and "Kaleden İniyorum" occur in Trabzon, Sivas and Maraş. No story of the origin of Demiray's song, for its part, appears in printed sources.

Musical Features

Demiray's instrument column in the list of performers is empty. Since that column was filled only with instruments played during the recording, it follows that the song was sung unaccompanied, by voice alone. No source gives the scale or metre of the melody.

Performers and Recordings

The team took six pieces from Demiray over two days; no other performance of "Kaleden Atılır" is on record. On 4 July "Irmakların Gümbürtüsü" and this song went onto side B of disc 1105 one after the other; when the team returned to Amasya on 6 July, Demiray this time sang "Dımbıla Gız (Oyun Havası)", Bayatı (Atüstü Bayatı), "Kür Gırağı" and "Segah". The second day's titles "Kür Gırağı" and "Bayatı" point east, to the banks of the Kura river and to the bayatı tradition of Azerbaijan; the first day's two songs, by contrast, name a castle and rivers. Among the songs on the same disc that passed into the TRT repertoire is Amasya'nın Dağları. General article: The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources