Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilün
Şimdi bir yeñiçeri ḫūbına meftūn olalı
Pīrimüz oldı Cenāb-ı Ḥacı Bektāş-ı Velī
In English
1. Ever since I fell for a Janissary beauty, our patron saint (pîr) has become His Excellency Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî.
Literary and Historical Commentary
A well-known link between the Ottoman military establishment and the life of the Sufi orders becomes a jest in this couplet. The Janissary corps was counted as attached to the Bektashi order, and Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî was named as the corps' pîr, its spiritual patron. When the lover gives his heart to a Janissary beauty, it is as if he too were bound to his beloved's corps, and that corps' patron becomes his patron as well. Love carries the lover into the beloved's world, as far as his profession and his order.
The Janissary beauty does not appear only in this couplet of Sâhib's divan: in ghazal 82 a beloved who is "kul oğlu", a soldier's son, lights the fire of love in the oven of the heart and is blessed with "may his hearth never lack". This matla names the same circle more openly. Given the place of the Janissaries in the life of eighteenth-century Istanbul, the poet's observation rests on an everyday sight. Within the jest, Hacı Bektaş's name is still kept dignified by the honorific "Cenâb-ı". The Janissary couplet is absent from the other two copies of the matlas and is found only in T. 738.
Bibliography
- Meral Topal, Pîrî-zâde Mehmed Sâhib Hayatı, Edebî Kişiliği, Eserleri ve Divanı'nın Tenkitli Metni, MA thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2004, p. 227, matla 15 (Istanbul University Library T. 738, fol. 4a). https://openaccess.firat.edu.tr/handle/11508/16014
Online sources
