Kul Hüseyin was an Alevi minstrel (âşık) who lived in the nineteenth century at Keçiköy, a village of the Gümüşhacıköy district of Amasya, and was revered locally as a "gerçek", a true one, that is, a saint. He is counted among the earliest âşıks of the region the people call "Gaziler Ovacığı", which takes in Merzifon, Suluova and Gümüşhacıköy; the Kul Hüseyin branch named after him is the starting point of a chain of âşıks led by Kul Fakir. There is no official document concerning him; all that we know has been gathered from the accounts of those who believed in him and from his deyiş, which lived on in memory. In research published in 2013 Caner Işık collected seventy-three of these deyiş from informants and set them down in writing. The seventy-three deyiş, together with two more published under his name in an online collection of deyiş, have been divided into separate pages in this category; each page holds the original text, a modern rendering and commentary.

His Life

Kul Hüseyin's dates of birth and death are not certain, and the sources give different dates. Caner Işık writes in his collection that it has been claimed he was born between 1795 and 1800 and died between 1875 and 1885. A collection based on Ali Cem Akbulut's 2010 book Gazilerovacığı Âşıkları gives the dates 1800-1885 and notes that the dates 1795-1878 have also been proposed, but that none of them is certain. In his paper published in 2017 Necdet Kurt uses the dates 1797-1882 and writes that, according to his son Halil Ağa, his father lived eighty-five years, between the Hijri years 1210 and 1295; these years fall roughly between 1795 and 1878 of the common era. Kurt adds that the Hijri dates 1297 and 1298 appear in two deyiş in his own archive, which suggests the poet was still alive in the early 1880s. Another source written on Kul Fakir says that Kul Hüseyin died in 1882.

According to some studies he was born in the village of Kazanlı in Suluova. Tradition gives his father's name as Veli and his mother's as Fadime. By one account he lost his father at the age of three or four; by another he lost his father at seven and his mother at twelve. He had no chance to study; at an early age he left his village and worked as a shepherd around the village of Yakup in Merzifon. He then settled in the village of Köseler in Gümüşhacıköy and finally in Keçiköy, where he married. According to Kurt he had sons named Veli, Halil and Hamza from this marriage. He spent his life as a shepherd and farmer. Işık writes that it is also related that he was left an orphan at Keçiköy and worked there as a shepherd.

He is said to have had a fine voice and to have played the cura, the small bağlama, well. According to Kurt he had a strong gift of improvisation, and it is often told that those who heard his voice and his saz would leave their work to listen to him; his cura has survived to our day. He died at Keçiköy and was buried there. According to Fedai Şahin's thesis completed in 2024, there is a tomb bearing his name in the village.

His Guide Hızır Sersem Baba

Kul Hüseyin's entry into the path is told locally through a mysterious account. According to Işık it is said that, rather than being trained directly by a guide, he was guided by Hızır while he was tending his flock. In oral tradition this guide has been turned into a person under the name "Hızır Sersem Baba", but no trace of him is found outside his relation with Kul Hüseyin; for this reason it is also told that he was in fact Hızır himself. Işık adds that it is also possible that Kul Hüseyin, in Gaziler Ovacığı, where there was a heavy migration of Bektashi dervishes, met one of the wandering "meczup" dervishes and was trained by him. It is told locally that because he had seen Hızır he lost his reason for a short time, wandered for a long while saying "I saw, but I will not tell", and then grew calm and became a friend of God.

Accounts based on Kurt and Akbulut present this guide as a more concrete person. According to them, in the years when he was a shepherd around Merzifon, Kul Hüseyin met Hızır Sersem Baba, one of the well-known elders of the region, stayed with him for a time and received his spiritual training, regarded him as his "uztaz", his master, "took hand" from him and never left his devotion until his death. Kurt also relates that, according to one account, Sersem Baba died immediately after Kul Hüseyin attached himself to him. A local book cited by Işık speaks of a Sersem Hızır Baba whose tomb is in the village of Karatepe in Merzifon. A separate page has been opened for Hızır Sersem Baba: Hızır Sersem Baba.

The sources also differ on his relation to the Hacı Bektaş lodge. Accounts based on Kurt and Akbulut write that Kul Hüseyin visited the Hacı Bektaş lodge and accepted Feyzullah Çelebi (1811-1878) and later Cemalettin Çelebi as his guides. Işık too notes that informants attached to the çelebi branch relate that he served these two çelebis; but he adds that his own research could establish no direct or indirect relation between Kul Hüseyin and the Hacı Bektaş lodge, and that because of his standing in the region the Bektashis may have tried to present him as a Bektashi.

Legends and Circle

In his lifetime Kul Hüseyin was named among the most respected "gerçek"s of the region. The best known of the accounts Işık collected concerns his musahip, Kumbabalı İbrahim Derviş, known as Büyük İbrahim Ağa (1840-1910). In the gathering after a cem ceremony Kul Hüseyin realised how much he missed his musahip and recited the deyiş that begins "My İbrahim, your greetings have stopped coming; come to our land, come wandering". Some time later İbrahim Derviş, who lived forty kilometres away near Osmancık, knocked at the door with his wife; he took up the saz and answered the call with a deyiş. Kul Fakir, who was present, was moved by this exchange and sang an improvised deyiş as well. Locally this account is told as an example of hearing what is said from afar, of fellowship from heart to heart.

There are other legends too: a bull about to be sacrificed speaking with Kul Hüseyin and agreeing to be slaughtered only on condition that it become God's morsel, and Kul Hüseyin healing all of Kul Fakir's wounds by washing them. According to Işık these wonders are interpreted for their meaning in the gatherings of the wise; the washing of the wounds, for example, is also understood as Kul Fakir being trained by Kul Hüseyin through word and gnosis. Two more stories are told about a deyiş on the religious law: in one, the kadı of Gümüş, on his way to inspect Keçiköy, is astonished when the shepherd he meets on the road answers his questions in verse and gives up inspecting the village; in the other, the young Hüseyin rescues an elder of his who had been arrested on the grounds that he was a Kızılbaş and knew nothing of religion, by answering the kadı's questions in verse.

Kul Hüseyin contributed to the training of many dervishes around him. According to Işık the best known of them are Kul Fakir Ali Derviş and his own son Halil Ağa (1876-1952). Kul Fakir attached himself to Kul Hüseyin in his youth and accepted him as his master; there is a separate category for Kul Fakir on our site. According to collected sources he was also a friend of minstrels such as Deli Boran and Sefil Ali. Kurt and Fatih Çelebi, drawing on Akbulut, note that Kul Hüseyin formed a branch of âşıks with his pupils and followers; according to Çelebi, Akbulut counts, among the branches of âşıks in Anatolia such as those of Erzurumlu Emrah, Bolulu Dertli and Ruhsatî, a Kul Hüseyin branch identified as centred on Merzifon. Derviş Edna of Çorum, a disciple of Kul Fakir, is also a link in this line: Derviş Edna.

His Connection with Amasya

Kul Hüseyin's whole life was spent among the present-day districts of Amasya. The village of Kazanlı, where he is said to have been born, belongs to Suluova; the village of Yakup, where he was a shepherd in childhood, to Merzifon; Köseler and Keçiköy, where he settled, to Gümüşhacıköy. Drawing on Akbulut, Işık defines Gaziler Ovacığı as the plain bounded by Mount İnegöl to the west, Mount Tavşan to the north, the foothills of Akdağ to the east and Mount Hamamözü Eğerli to the south. According to a legend told locally, Hızır emptied his bag over this plain, and every grain of wheat that fell corresponds to a "gerçek", a saint; for this reason the plain never lacks saints. Işık writes that the region saw important changes with the abolition of the Janissary corps in 1826 and the exile to Amasya of Hamdullah Çelebi, head of the Hacı Bektaş lodge, that many dervishes settled in this area, and that Kul Hüseyin was a fruit of this period. Our article The minstrel tradition in Amasya likewise names him among the âşıks of Gaziler Ovacığı.

His Poetry

Kul Hüseyin's deyiş were accepted in the region as "the word of God", regarded as words that guide on the spiritual path, and recited in the cem. Işık notes that his deyiş were generally written in the koşma form and may be assessed in the category of the nefes, and that he also has deyiş of the güzelleme, düvaz-ı imam, mersiye, nasihatname, battalname, semah and münacat kinds. The great majority of the seventy-three deyiş are in the eleven-syllable metre; nine are in the eight-syllable metre and one in the fifteen-syllable. Among the informants who passed the deyiş on to Işık were Erdoğan Koç, Kul Hüseyin's descendant in the fifth generation, Ali Yüksel of Keçiköy, known as Derviş Ali, Âşık Cafer Aydoğdu, Âşık Hasan Özabdal, who served as zakir with the fiddle, and Hüseyin Zeytünlü, known as Âşık Kara Hüseyin.

The main thought of the deyiş is that God is a guest in the human heart. According to Işık, Kul Hüseyin embraced the view of finding the truth in his own being, cleansing what he found and preparing it for God to be a guest there; the lines "you seek the qibla, the qibla is in you" and "you seek the Kaaba, the Kaaba is in you" are the best-known expressions of this view. He exalted fellowship and friendship against blind zealotry, regarded judging and classifying people as a straying from the truth, and addressed a hoca with "come, hey hoca, do not sell us your learning". He gave great value to the human being and to beauty and counted loving a beloved as part of loving God; his poem beginning "man is part by part, the earth vein by vein" is an example of this view. Love of the Prophet's Family, the Twelve Imams, the mourning of Karbala, the expectation of the Mahdi, the narrative of the Ascension and the assembly of the Forty, a devriye telling of the soul's circling through the ages and a destan of the ages that counts human life year by year are also among his deyiş.

Some of his deyiş have also become known beyond the region. According to Işık's notes Zülfü Livaneli collected and sang the crane semah with the refrain "tarry, my crane, tarry, let us go to the pir", Âşık Gülabi collected and made known the nefes "the blessing of Abdal Musa has reached us", and Erdal Erzincan the poem "man is part by part, the earth vein by vein". The traces of a life spent as a shepherd and farmer are in the poems too: deer shot and fleeing, the move to the summer pasture, bleating sheep, the yoke and its peg, the mill and the sieve. Since Kul Hüseyin died in the nineteenth century, his deyiş are not under copyright.

The State of the Sources

None of the information about Kul Hüseyin rests on a written document; Işık writes plainly that the accounts carry intense emotion, are handed down as legends together with marvels, and that it is hard to draw a historical life story from them. The dates therefore do not agree. The expression "the year one thousand two hundred and twenty" in one deyiş corresponds to the Hijri year 1220, that is, 1806; Işık notes that this date does not match the collected dates of birth, and that either the dating is wrong or the poet's life was longer than has been established. The conversion of the Hijri dates Kurt gives has also been miscalculated in his paper: the Hijri year 1295 corresponds to 1878, while the paper has 1888/9.

The likeness of names creates a second difficulty. There is more than one poet in Anatolia who used the pen name Kul Hüseyin; the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, for example, records a Kul Hüseyin from Şarkışla in Sivas as a nineteenth-century âşık. According to Işık, the four nefes published in Sadettin Nüzhet's 1930 book Bektaşi Şairleri, and the information there on a relation with Kul Himmet, concern other Kul Hüseyins; the Kul Hüseyin of Gaziler Ovacığı had no military past and no relation with Kul Himmet. The deyiş in which Kul Hüseyin is known to have put a question to Kul Himmet can, according to Işık, only be a response poem written to an older deyiş. That three deyiş which an online collection of deyiş gives under Kul Hüseyin's name from Cahit Öztelli's book Pir Sultan'ın Dostları are variants of deyiş Işık collected around Keçiköy also bears the traces of this confusion of names.

For this reason the attribution of some deyiş in the category is disputed, and this is noted separately on the pages concerned. The deyiş "Anda hasıl oldu güruhu naci" bears the pen name Kul Himmet and is known as Kul Himmet's answer to Kul Hüseyin's question. It has been claimed that the semah "Hey şahin bakışlım bülbül avazlım" in fact belongs to Hüseyin Fevzi Efendi, one of the çelebis of Hacı Bektaş. In the deyiş "Himmet eyle gideyim de geleyim" the speaker presents himself as Derviş Ali of the line of Şah İbrahim. For the twenty-quatrain deyiş on the religious law, Işık himself raises the possibility that it is not Kul Hüseyin's because of its quatrains that do not fit the koşma form and its didactic arrangement. The two deyiş not included in Işık's collection have been published only in an online collection, one from a music album and the other without a source. Akbulut's books of 2010 and 2015 and Erdoğan Koç's Âşık Kul Hüseyin, published in 2015, were not available to us; we give the information in these books as reported by other authors.

Chronology

1795-1800: His birth according to the collected accounts; some sources give the village of Kazanlı in Suluova as his birthplace.

1826: The Janissary corps is abolished; according to Işık many dervishes settle in Gaziler Ovacığı after this event.

1876: His son Halil Ağa is born.

1875-1885: Dates proposed for his death; the years 1878, 1882 and 1885 appear in the sources. He is buried at Keçiköy.

2013: Caner Işık publishes seventy-three of his deyiş, collected from informants.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

  • Fatih Çelebi, "Âşıklık Geleneğinin Temsilcilerinden Kul Fakir'in Eserlerinde 'Dost' Kavramı", Evrim Çağlayan (ed.), Kültür ve Güzel Sanatlar, Karabük: Karabük University Press, 2026, pp. 4-6. https://kutuphane.karabuk.edu.tr/yuklenen/dosyalar/1263062026150047.pdf
  • Orhan Fatih Kuşdemir, "Kul Fakir Ali, Ali Oymak", Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, 2019. https://teis.yesevi.edu.tr/madde-detay/kul-fakir-ali-ali-oymak
  • Doğan Kaya, "Kul Hüseyin", Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, 2014 (on his namesake from Sivas). https://teis.yesevi.edu.tr/madde-detay/kul-huseyin
  • Ali Cem Akbulut, Gazilerovacığı Âşıkları, İstanbul: KaraMavi Yayınları, 2010; as reported in "Kul Hüseyin", Alevi Deyişleri Nefesler Hakk Âşıkları, 21 August 2019. https://www.deyisler-nefesler.com/kul-huseyin/
  • Ali Cem Akbulut, Âşık Kul Hüseyin ve Kul Hüseyin Kolu Âşıkları, Ankara: Dumat, 2015 (as cited in Kurt 2017 and Kuşdemir 2019).
  • Erdoğan Koç, Âşık Kul Hüseyin, ed. D. D. Işık, İstanbul: Can Yayınları, 2015 (as cited in Şahin 2024).
  • Ahmet Ankaralı, Sedat Cin, Galip Tuncay, Dünden Bugüne Gümüşhacıköy, Gümüşhacıköy, 1997, p. 204 (as cited in Işık 2013).

Online sources