Ozan Fedaî, whose real name was Fedai Koç, was a folk poet (ozan) born in the village of Sarımeşe (Efte) in Amasya. As a young man he married and went to Germany, where he spent most of his life working as a lorry driver, and he sang his poems to the saz at the festivals of Turkish associations in Europe, at concerts and on television programmes. After retiring he returned to Amasya; he died in Samsun on 4 March 2024 and was buried in the central cemetery of Amasya. Longing for home in exile, the homeland, martyrdom, Gallipoli and Sarıkamış, the Republic and Atatürk, earthquakes and the sufferings of the Turkic world are the main themes of his poetry. In 2003 he gathered some eighty of his poems in a book entitled Azad Eyle, and in 2016 he was registered by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as a folk poet bearing Intangible Cultural Heritage. Fedâî Baba (1855-1940), the Hak âşığı of Yassıçal who bore the same pen name, was a different person; Fedai Koç himself said that he took his pen name from that minstrel.

Life

Fedai Koç was born in the village of Sarımeşe, known locally as Efte, in the central district of Amasya. His family lived by raising livestock. His father was a veteran of the Korean War, remembered among the soldiers who broke out of the encirclement at the Battle of Kunuri; he died at the end of December 1992. His mother, Şerife Hanım, known in the village as "Büyük Çerkez", was a skilled seamstress. Each of his parents had four children from an earlier marriage when they lost their spouses and married one another; Fedai was the ninth child, born after these eight step-siblings, and he had no full brothers or sisters. He himself stated that there were no minstrels in his family or immediate circle. His childhood was spent in poverty; he attended primary school in his village and secondary school in the township of Aydınca.

In 1975 he married a relative and went to Germany under family reunification. He did his military service in Turkey between November 1976 and June 1978 and then returned to Germany. There he worked for many years as a lorry driver for a factory, retiring in 2003. Married and the father of two children, the poet formed close friendships during his years abroad with folk poets such as Ozan Arif, Yusuf Polatoğlu and Hilmi Şahballı. After returning from Germany he lived in Amasya, taking care to attend the festivals, poetry recitals, highland fairs and evening gatherings held in his home province. He died on 4 March 2024 in Samsun, in the hospital where he was being treated, and was buried in the central cemetery of Amasya.

Connection with Amasya

Most of Fedai Koç's life was spent abroad, yet it began and ended in Amasya. Born and raised in the village where his family lived, he never broke his ties with his homeland; he returned to the city in retirement and was buried there. His pen name, for its part, ties him to one of the city's older minstrels. That he bore the name of the minstrel with the pen name Fedâî from the village of Ebemü in Yassıçal, whose real name was Hüseyin Gümüş and who died in 1940, that is, Fedâî Baba, was the reason he did not look for a separate pen name. His Amasya poems hold a place of their own: in the poems "Amasya'da" and "Heri Heri" he describes the city's history, its princes, the legend of Ferhat and Şirin, the Yeşilırmak, its hospital, its hans and baths, and its saints such as Gani Baba, Ergonaş Baba and Serçoban. In "Heri Heri" his use as a refrain of the local dialect word meaning "well, come now, at last" is one of the rare instances in which he carried the Amasya dialect into his verse. The life of his namesake is treated separately in Fedâî Baba, Hak âşığı of Yassıçal, while the other minstrels of Amasya are brought together under the minstrel tradition in Amasya.

Minstrelsy

He himself described how his interest in poetry and folk song went back to his childhood: "As children, herding kids and lambs in the mountains, we would sing türkü to ourselves, sometimes out of fear and sometimes out of joy." He began to write, however, in the autumn of 1979, in Germany. He relates that longing for his homeland and his native region first turned him to painting and then to poetry, and that when poetry won out he learned to play the saz. He learned the instrument on his own, without lessons and without notation. In his interview with Ayşe Keleş he said that he was a badeli âşık (a minstrel inspired by a mystical draught in a dream) and that he had many times seen himself in dreams playing the saz and singing beside a saint named Belan, believed to lie at the place called Belan in his village.

In his first years abroad he trained himself by listening to the records and cassettes of the masters and reading their books. In 1980 he began to play and sing at the cultural festivals of Turkish associations; in 1987 he joined the staff of the Avrupa Türk İslam Birliği (ATİB, the Turkish Islamic Union of Europe), and under that roof he had the chance to share the stage with the masters whose cassettes he had listened to. He regarded meeting and conversing with Yaşar Reyhanî and Âşık Mahzunî Şerif as the turning point of his minstrelsy. He counts Pir Sultan Abdal, Sümmânî, Karacaoğlan, Âşık Veysel, Mahzunî Şerif, Âşık Yaşar, Reyhanî, Seyrânî and Erzurumlu Emrah among those he regarded as masters; he says he took Mahzunî as his model on the saz, Veysel and Reyhanî in words, and Abdurrahim Karakoç in poetry. In an interview with Kuşdemir he related that amid the left-right clashes of the years in which he grew up he took his place on the nationalist side, and that living in Germany strengthened his national and spiritual feelings and drew him towards nationalist minstrels such as Ozan Arif.

He released two cassettes, "Almanya'dan Vatana" (From Germany to the Homeland) in 1983 and "Anadolu Marşı" (Anatolian March) in 1989. He won places in the competitions he entered and received various awards in Turkey and Germany. In Azad Eyle, which he had printed at his own expense in 2003, he brought together some eighty of his poems. In his last years he also shared his poems on his social media account; part of the poems studied by Hatice Sargın were taken from these posts.

Poetry

Copyright note: Ozan Fedaî died on 4 March 2024; his poems will stay in copyright for seventy years after his death, until the close of 2094. That is why they are not given pages of their own here. A single quatrain is quoted to introduce him.

Fedaî composed poems in the forms of the koşma, the hymn (ilahi), the satirical taşlama, the güzelleme, the lament (ağıt), the verse tale and free verse. He held that minstrelsy demands an immediate response to the events around one; he was gifted at improvisation and took care to record many of the poems he improvised. At the centre of his poetry stands an Anatolia shaped by a Turkish-Islamic outlook and a love of the homeland. Longing for home in exile, nostalgia for old times, complaint against the age, love of family, devotion to the saints of Anatolia and to the great figures of Turkish history are themes he treated often. With the sensitivity that living abroad brought, he responded at once in verse to bad news from Turkey or to any decline in spiritual values.

Hatice Sargın has examined Fedaî's poems from the standpoint of oral history and drawn attention to how much room historical events occupy in his verse. Karbala, the siege of Vienna under Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha, the Battle of Gallipoli and Corporal Seyit, the Sarıkamış operation, the Republic, Atatürk and 10 November, Cyprus, Karabakh, Palestine, the experiences of the Uyghur and Crimean Turks, the Arab Spring, Hagia Sophia, and the 1999 Marmara, 2005 Pakistan and 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes are among the subjects treated in these poems. According to Sargın, the poet tends to mention many historical matters together in a single poem rather than treating one event, entering into detail only here and there; his poems are valuable for recording the popular feeling that lies between the lines of official history. His poems on the history of Sivas follow the same line.

His Amasya poems are the texts that best show how he saw the city's history. The first quatrain of "Heri Heri", which he shared in January 2024, runs:

Amasya denince ilk akla gelen
Yeşilırmak başka akıyor heri
Şirin'in aşkına dağları delen
Ferhat'ın sevdası kokuyor heri

He says that the Yeşilırmak, the first thing that comes to mind when Amasya is named, flows in a different way, and that the passion of Ferhat, who pierced the mountains for love of Şirin, pervades the city. In the following quatrains he calls the city "the seal that history stamped on its brow" and a place famed for its princes, recalls Selim I and Mihrimah Hatun, whom he counts as the first woman poet, names Kurşunlu and Saraydüzü, Gani Baba and Ergonaş Baba, and Serçoban, held to be the brother of İğneci Baba, and in the last quatrain expresses his longing from exile for his homeland. The poem "Amasya'da" follows the same line, praising the city as the home of princes, saints and men of learning and describing its historic fabric with its open places of worship, baths and hans.

State of the Sources

Ozan Fedaî's life is known to us through four works: Ayşe Keleş's article, based on an interview with the poet, published in 2010 in the fourth volume of the series Sazın ve Sözün Sultanları; the 2013 anthology of Amasya poets by Ali Rıza Atasoy and his colleagues; Orhan Fatih Kuşdemir's 2021 book collecting his life and examples of his poems; and Hatice Sargın's study published in 2025 in the symposium volume of Amasya University. We have not been able to see the works of Keleş, Atasoy and Kuşdemir directly; their information is given here through the entry in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü and Sargın's citations.

The sources diverge on several points. The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü gives the poet's year of birth as 1959 and writes that he went to Germany at the age of nineteen; Sargın, relying on the life story written by the poet himself, gives 1956 and his departure for Germany in 1975. The dates of his military service (1976-1978) can be said to fit better with a birth in 1956, and that date has been followed here. There are also two accounts of his pen name: according to Keleş, since his name was already Fedai, the poet did not look for a separate pen name and adopted that of Fedâî of Yassıçal; Sargın also writes that once his name was Fedai, Âşık Reyhanî, whom he regarded as his master, gave him this pen name. Likewise, while the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü states that he had no master to whom he was apprenticed, the list cited by Sargın names Reyhanî and Mahzunî as "masters"; this may be understood as referring to minstrels he took as models rather than to a master-apprentice relationship. The date of his death rests solely on an interview Sargın conducted in 2025 with someone close to the poet. The details given for his namesake in Yassıçal do not agree either: Fedai Koç names him Hüseyin Gümüş, whereas the real name of Fedâî Baba, as told from its sources in the separate article on this site, appears as Konaşoğlu Hüseyin.

Chronology

1956: Born in the village of Sarımeşe (Efte) in Amasya (1959 in one source).

1975: Marries and goes to Germany under family reunification.

1976-1978: Does his military service in Turkey, then returns to Germany.

1979: Begins to write poetry.

1980: Begins to play and sing at the festivals of Turkish associations in Europe.

1983: His cassette "Almanya'dan Vatana" is released.

1987: Joins the staff of the Turkish Islamic Union of Europe.

1989: His cassette "Anadolu Marşı" is released.

2003: Retires; Azad Eyle, collecting some eighty of his poems, is published.

2016: Registered by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as a folk poet bearing Intangible Cultural Heritage.

2021: Orhan Fatih Kuşdemir's book on his life and poems is published.

4 March 2024: Dies in Samsun; buried in the central cemetery of Amasya.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Ayşe Keleş, "Fedaî Koç (Âşık Fedaî)", Fatma Ahsen Turan, Başak Uysal (ed.), Sazın ve Sözün Sultanları: Yaşayan Halk Şairleri, vol. IV, Ankara: Gazi Kitabevi, 2010, pp. 148-170 (cited through Dağlı 2019 and Sargın 2025).

Academic studies

Official sources

  • Ali Rıza Atasoy, F. Aktaş, A. Ayvalı, Amasya Şairleri Seçme Şiirler Antolojisi, Amasya: Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2013, p. 208 (cited through Dağlı 2019). sbe.amasya.edu.tr

Books

  • Ahmet Dağlı, "Fedaî, Fedai Koç", Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, 06.03.2019 (updated 07.12.2020). https://teis.yesevi.edu.tr/madde-detay/fedai-fedai-koc
  • Orhan Fatih Kuşdemir, Âşık Edebiyatı ve Amasyalı Ozan Fedaî: Hayatı, Sanatı, Şiirlerinden Örnekler, Ankara: Gece Kitaplığı, 2021 (cited through Sargın 2025).
  • Murat Erciyas, Şenol Şener (ed.), 10 Usta Kalem Şiirler, Ankara: Gülnar Yayınları, 2023, pp. 67-68 (cited through Sargın 2025).