A young man who joined the army at eighteen knows that he will not be given his discharge papers before three years are up, and he tells his mother not to weep. Collected in Taşova, this lament is the only work registered to Amasya in the long-song (uzun hava) section of the TRT repertoire. Its notation records no mode, metre or range; beside the number 670, its catalogue entry holds only the source performer, the collector, the district and the genre "lament".

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: TRT Turkish Folk Music repertoire 670 (uzun hava section)
  • Region: Amasya, Taşova
  • Source performer: Altan Demirok
  • Collected by: Şenel Önaldı
  • Date of collection: not given in the entry
  • Transcribed by: not given in the entry
  • Mode and metre: not given in the entry; as an uzun hava it is in free metre
  • Genre: uzun hava (long song), lament (military service)
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • TRT link: TRT has no public page for individual repertoire items; the catalogue data and lyrics of no. 670 can be read on Repertükül. The same page has no image of the notation and no audio file.
  • Overview article: The Melody of the Yeşilırmak

Lyrics

The text is taken from the repertoire words of no. 670, lowered from capitals. The title of the work says "üstünde" (on top of), while the first line of the words is written "üstüne" (onto); both are left as they are.

Kışlanın üstüne kurdum iskele
On sekiz yaşımda geldim askere
Üç yıl demeyince vermez teskere
Bağlantı:
Bu sebepten arz ederim ben de sılamı
Anam ağlama ciğer dağlama
Attın beni gurbete mekân bağlama
Kışlanın önünde bir pınar akar
Oturmuş askerler çamaşır yıkar
Sılada sevdiğim yollara bakar
(Bağlantı)

The lament is built of three-line strophes, each followed by a refrain (bağlantı). In the first strophe the soldier says that he set up a scaffold on the barracks, that he joined the army at eighteen, and that his discharge papers will not be given before three years have passed. "Teskere" is the colloquial form of "tezkere", the discharge certificate. The text does not explain what the scaffold was for; it may be a building scaffold put up by a soldier working at the barracks, or a word that entered the line for its sound.

The "arz ederim" of the refrain's first line is most probably a shortened "arzu ederim", I long for; the sense would then be "and so I too long for my homeland". He then turns to his mother: do not weep, do not sear my heart. In the next line, "you cast me into exile", the one reproached may be the mother or may be fate; the line does not say. "Mekân bağlama" in the last line can be read in two ways: either "do not settle in a foreign land" or "do not stay bound to one place on my account". The second strophe describes a spring flowing in front of the barracks, soldiers sitting there washing their clothes, and a sweetheart at home watching the roads.

Story

Lamenting a young man who goes off to the army is a subject in its own right in the local tradition. In his study of the lament tradition of the Amasya region, Haluk Yücel, classifying laments by subject, counts those sung after young men who leave home for military service as a separate group, and writes that pride and the grief of parting are intertwined in them. The laments Yücel describes are sung by the young man's relatives. In the Taşova lament, by contrast, the words are in the soldier's mouth; the young man far from home himself addresses his weeping mother. No published record has come to light showing that it was made for a particular person or event.

Musical Features

In the repertoire the fields for mode, metre, final note and range are all empty, and the name of the transcriber is not given either. With an uzun hava it is usual for no metre to be entered, since it is in free time, but the absence of the mode and of the range leaves too little information for a musical analysis of the work. In the 2018 table showing the genre structure of Amasya songs, Haluk Yücel counts the piece under the title "Kışlanın üstüne kurdum iskele"; no publication analysing its notation is known. From the structure of the words only this much follows: the strophes are in eleven-syllable lines, and the lines of the refrain differ from them in syllable count. No notation has been published that would show how the melody handles this difference.

Performers and Recordings

The entry gives no further information on the source performer Altan Demirok or the collector Şenel Önaldı, including the date of collection. Nor do the printed sources mention a recording of the lament by another singer, a radio broadcast or a record.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources