Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: fā‘ilātün / fā‘ilātün / fā‘ilātün / fā‘ilün

Didi tārīḫin bunuñ tā şād olup rūḥ-ı Ḥüseyn
Ḥaḳ yolında Mīr Yegen-zāde aḳıtdı āb-ı ‘ayn (1208)

In English

1. So that the soul of Hüseyin might rejoice, he gave its chronogram thus: "On God's path Mîr Yegenzâde made the spring water flow".

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

This is a one-couplet chronogram for a charitable water work, in the remel pattern "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün". Babaarslan records it as "chronogram for Yegenzâde's bringing of water (1208)"; the year 1208 corresponds to 1793-94. A chronogram (tarih) gives the year of an event through a phrase or line whose letters, added up by their numerical values (the ebced system), yield that year. The date is given by the second line, "Ḥaḳ yolında Mīr Yegen-zāde aḳıtdı āb-ı ‘ayn".

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The Hüseyin of the first line is an important point corrected by Babaarslan. Two earlier studies had written that this poem was composed "for the death of someone called Hüseyin". Babaarslan shows that the Hüseyin meant here is Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet, and that the couplet says Yegenzâde gladdened Husayn's soul by bringing water to the city, in allusion to the events of Karbala. The memory of Husayn, martyred at Karbala after being cut off from water, gives a charitable water work its meaning as a prayer and a good deed. The phrase "āb-ı ‘ayn" in the second line can mean both "spring water" and "water of the eye, tears"; the two meanings bring together the tears shed for Husayn and the water offered to the people. This second reading is our observation.

Historical Context

The Yegenzâdes were one of the old notable families of Amasya. Hüsameddin writes that the family descended from Yeğen Ali Bey, who lived in the mid-seventeenth century, and that its best-known members were the vizier Ömer Paşa and the notable İbrahim Âsım Bey. The Yegenzâde called "Mîr" in the couplet is not named, nor does the couplet say to which part of Amasya the water was brought. The long chronogram Vâzıh wrote in 1245 for the pavilions built by Hacı İbrâhim Bey of the same family is Chronogram 30.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

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