A carpenter's apprentice who entered a treasurer's mansion and there learned to read and write, to compose verse and to keep accounts, Şûhî Ebûbekir Çelebi was one of the convivial poets of seventeenth-century Amasya. His father was Hasan Usta, one of the city's carpenters; he himself rose from secretary to his master to steward of the registers, and after his master's death to secretary of the office of escheated property, dying in 1075 (1664-65). Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar writes that his flirtatious poems became material for the saz poets. Most of them had been collected in Abdî Efendi's anthology, and they went into the fire along with it.

Hüsameddin's Record

Short as it is, the entry in the eleventh volume of Amasya Tarihi holds all the turns of a life story:

Şûhî Ebûbekir Çelebi-Dülgeroğlu Amasya dülgerlerinden Hasan ustanın oğludur. Evâ'il-i hâlinde dilber bir dülger çırağı iken defterdâr Ebûbekir Efendi'nin konağına intisâb ederek iç oğlanı oldu. Efendisinin hüsn-i nazarı sâyesinde okuyup yazdı. Şiir ve kitâbet öğrendi. Uşağıyla müşâare ederek şûhâne eş'ârı saz şâirlerine sermâye oldu. İbtidâ Ebûbekir Efendi'nin kâtibi, sonra defter kethüdâsı oldu. Mumâ-ileyhin vefâtında beytü'l-mâl emâneti kâtibi olup meclis-i yârânın medâr-ı neşâtı zümre-i küttâbın ser-defteri olduğu halde 1075'de vefât etdi. Şâir, kâtib, hattât, sohbet ve simâsı latîf, meclis-ârâ bir zât idi. Abdî Efendi Mecmuası'nda hayli eş'ârı vardı. Hayfâ ki yandı. Mahdûmu Nedim Mehmed Efendi "Dülgerzâde" demekle meşhûrdur.

A plainer version: His father was Hasan Usta, one of the carpenters of Amasya. At the beginning of his life, while a handsome carpenter's apprentice, he entered the mansion of the treasurer Ebûbekir Efendi and became a page of the household. Thanks to his master's favour he learned to read and write; he also learned poetry and secretarial work. The flirtatious poems he wrote in poetic exchanges with an uşak became stock-in-trade for the saz poets. He was first Ebûbekir Efendi's secretary, then steward of the registers. When his master died he became secretary of the office of escheated property, and he died in 1075 as the life of his friends' gatherings and the foremost of the scribes. He was a poet, scribe and calligrapher, pleasant in conversation and in looks, an ornament of gatherings. Many of his poems were in the Abdî Efendi Anthology. Alas, it burned. His son Nedîm Mehmed Efendi is known as "Dülgerzâde", son of the carpenter.

From the Carpenter's Bench to the Scribe's Desk

Şûhî's story shows clearly the part played by great households as places of education in Ottoman towns. A craftsman's son entered the household of a statesman as a page and, under his master's patronage, learned reading and writing, the scribe's craft and poetry in that house. Hüsameddin's open use of the adjective "dilber", handsome, implies that the apprentice's looks had a share in his being taken into the mansion; the entry records this as it is, without passing judgement.

The entry does not say which treasury Ebûbekir Efendi served; Hüsameddin calls him only "the treasurer Ebûbekir Efendi". In this household Şûhî became first his master's secretary, then steward of the registers, that is, head of the clerks keeping the records of the treasurer's office. After his master's death he did not leave the pen behind but moved to the secretaryship of the beytülmal office. This office seized and administered, on behalf of the state, property that had no heirs or whose owner was unknown; its secretaryship was a trusted, middle-ranking post in the financial bureaucracy.

A Poet of Gatherings

The entry's sentence about his poetry can be read in two ways. The word uşak in the phrase "uşağıyla müşâare ederek" means both a servant and a young boy; Hüsameddin does not say who this partner was. Müşaere is an exchange between two poets in answering couplets. The "şûhâne", flirtatious and playful, poems born of these exchanges became, according to Hüsameddin, "sermâye", capital, for the saz poets: it seems that minstrels took up Şûhî's couplets in their own songs, and perhaps that his poems circulated among the people like folk songs. The pen name suits the mood of these poems; "şûh" means coquettish and lively.

The words Hüsameddin chooses to describe him point the same way: "meclis-i yârânın medâr-ı neşâtı", the source of merriment in his friends' gatherings, and "meclis-ârâ", one who adorns a gathering. Şûhî seems to have been known as much for his conversation and quick wit as for his identity as a divan poet. That his son Nedîm Mehmed Efendi was called "Dülgerzâde" shows that the family's artisan origins were not forgotten a generation later.

The Abdî Efendi Anthology

The loss of Şûhî's poems is tied to one of the great losses of Amasya's literary history. Hüsameddin used the anthology of Amasya poets by Abdî Efendi, professor at the Abdullah Paşa madrasa, together with the collections he left, and these works perished in a fire while in his hands. Şûhî's "many poems" were in this "Abdî Efendi Anthology". Whether this was the biographical anthology itself or a separate poetry collection compiled by Abdî Efendi is not clear. Among the poets of Abdî Efendi's lost anthology, too, Şûhî appears as a scribe-poet who died in 1075 and whose poems burned.

His Poetry

Nothing of Şûhî's verse is extant. Hüsameddin says he saw a good many of them in the anthology, yet he included not a single couplet in the entry. The report that his poems were used by saz poets suggests that some of his couplets may have lived on in minstrels' notebooks or among folk poems under other names; the entry offers no clue that would allow such a trail to be followed. Metin Hakverdioğlu, who examined Hüsameddin's work as a kind of anthology of poets, likewise included him in his list as "Şûhî Ebûbekir Çelebi-Dülgeroğlu".

Bibliography

Online sources