Only half of this deyiş's title can still be read on the collection card. The opening words and the addition in brackets at the end have faded away, and the catalogue marks these gaps with ellipses; what remains is "Rast geldi bir mahbubu âlem". The deyiş was sung together onto the conservatory team's disc on 5 July 1943 by two saz players from the village of Girap in the Ezine subdistrict, Davut Aslan and Mehmet İnan.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Source persons: Davut Aslan (saz; year of birth on the card 1308; farmer) and Mehmet İnan (saz; year of birth on the card 1327; farmer); both from the village of Girap, Ezine subdistrict, central Amasya
  • Place and date of collection: village of Zigala (today Aydınca), 5 July 1943; the place name is in square brackets in the catalogue, that is, a correction by the cataloguer
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory collecting team (Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, the technician Rıza Yetişen)
  • Genre: deyiş
  • Mode, rhythm: not on the card
  • Words and music: anonymous; no poet's name appears in the legible part of the title
  • Source publication: Celal Volkan Kaya, Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarı'nın Halk Müziği Alan Araştırmaları Kataloğu (İTÜ, 2014), no. 3598
  • Location in the archive: former Folklore Archive of the Ankara State Conservatory, disc 1109/B-1
  • Link: there is no TRT recording; the entry is in the full text of Kaya's catalogue

Lyrics

… Rast geldi bir mahbubu âlem (…)

"Rast gelmek" means to come across someone, and "mahbub-ı âlem" is the beloved of the world, a beauty admired by all; the legible fragment can be understood as "came across the beloved of the world" or "I came across", the subject having stayed in the faded part. Kaya writes that he marked with ellipses the information he could not read because the cards had faded. The papers his catalogue rests on are the card copies TRT made in the 1970s under the supervision of Nida Tüfekçi and Yücel Paşmakçı, and on some of these copies the ink has faded over time. Kaya also states at the outset that he did not include the words of the pieces in his lists. For this reason the full text of the deyiş is in no publication; its sound opens side B of disc 1109. The discs of the old Folklore Archive are today at Hacettepe University's conservatory, and the archive is closed to researchers.

Story

For works of minstrel literature the poet's name was often written in the "name of the piece" field of the card, and where it was not, Kaya added it himself from the pen name. There is no such name in the legible part of this card; whether the erased opening contained a poet's name can no longer be told. No account of the occasion on which the deyiş was sung was recorded either.

Musical Features

Both singers used the saz in the recording; the card does not say which of them carried the voice or whether the two instruments played together, nor does it give the mode or the metre. Its place on the disc, however, is clear. The last recording on side A is the elegy the pair sang from Garip; this deyiş was put at the head of side B, followed immediately by the same pair's song "Cemal: Şen olasın Ürgüp dumanın gitmez". Kaya's list of performers leaves the two men's years of birth as they stand on the cards: 1308 and 1327. On the cards the year of birth is mostly written in the Rumi calendar; read that way, Davut Aslan was born in 1892-1893 and Mehmet İnan in 1911-1912.

Performers and Recordings

Several of the pieces the pair from Girap sang that day later passed into the TRT repertoire: the elegy sung from Garip and the lament about Molla Mustafa and his son are among them. Cemal, which follows this deyiş on the disc, and Keklik, which the pair sang onto the next disc, have pages of their own as well. This deyiş, with its half-lost title, has no performance beyond the 1943 recording. The melodies collected in Zigala and the other villages of the province are surveyed together in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources