In the days before electricity, radio and screens reached people's homes, one of the most precious things a household in Amasya could possess was a grandmother who told tales well or a grandfather with a ready wit. The long winter nights were shortened by tales and anecdotes told while the stove crackled or beside the tandır oven; children drifted off to sleep on these stories, while their elders drew from the same words a lesson about life, a consolation or a well-aimed jab. The tale was a long journey that fed the imagination, the anecdote a sharp observation finished in a few sentences. Both were handed down without ever being written, from mouth to ear and from generation to generation, and for centuries they carried a community's shared wisdom, its moral sense and its way of laughing.

In this respect the oral culture of Amasya cannot be separated from the wider heritage of Anatolia. Most of the tales told here are local renderings of types known in other provinces as well, and a good part of the anecdotes belong to Nasreddin Hoca and similar figures who circulate throughout the Turkish-speaking world. Even so, the narrator's dialect, the words he or she chooses, the wedding and custom details woven into the tale and its links with local legends make the story belong to this city and its villages. Since the riddles, rhymes and blessing formulas of the region and the conversation gatherings of its winter nights are treated in separate articles, the emphasis here falls on the tale, the anecdote and the legends that mingle with them.

Where Tale, Anecdote and Legend Meet

Folklorists distinguish oral narratives according to how the teller and the listener regard what is being told. The tale (masal) is a product of imagination from beginning to end; its time is indefinite, its setting often a "land of tales" that exists nowhere, and its narration is dominated by the reported past, the Turkish "-mış" mood. No one truly believes in the marvels of a story that opens with "Once there was, once there wasn't"; the opening phrase works almost as a signal announcing from the outset that what follows makes no claim to be believed. The characters of the tale are likewise nameless and placeless: a padishah, a merchant, an old woman, a Keloğlan. In some tales animals take the place of people, in others giants, fairies and dragons join the adventure. Most tales end happily and leave the listener with a lesson of their own accord.

The anecdote (fıkra), by contrast, is a short witty story told in prose. What sets it apart from other genres is its ability to say much in few words, to make people think while making them laugh, and to touch on social ills through humour. There is no room in the anecdote for long description, detail or ornate narration; the situation is set up in a few sentences, tied in a knot through a brief exchange and usually resolved with a single reply. Anecdotes are generally attached to a type or a group: Nasreddin Hoca, the Bektashi dervish, Bekri Mustafa, İncili Çavuş or the people of a particular region.

The legend (efsane) stands between these two genres, yet in a place clearly its own. Both the one who relates a legend and the one who hears it believe that what is told is true. It is tied to a particular place, a tomb, a rock, a spring or a historical person, and it often begins with "according to tradition". In the words of the folklorist Linda Dégh, tales are an escape from reality, while legends mean facing it. Pertev Naili Boratav defines the legend as "short narratives in plain spoken language, devoid of any stylistic concern and leaving no room for set formulas". The line between genres is not always sharp; researchers also accept that many of the tales in the Aarne-Thompson catalogue are in fact legends, and that what is called a tale from one point of view may count as a legend from another. The narrator of Amasya blended these two genres skilfully, passing gracefully from one to the other in the course of a single winter night.

The Setting of the Tale

In Anatolia the tale was traditionally told within the home by people known as the "tale mother", "tale midwife", "tale grandmother" or simply "taleteller". Although there was no firm prohibition on when tales might be told, their true season was winter. The stove, the tandır and the village guest room were the natural stage for these narratives. The tale scholar Saim Sakaoğlu puts it with an apt observation: a tale told on the night of an exhausting summer day can never be as sweet as one told on the night of an undemanding winter's day. When the work in the fields, vineyards and orchards was done, when the winter provisions were in the larder and snow had closed the roads, the nights grew long in the villages of Amasya too, and the time given to tales expanded. Whereas the telling of a folk romance could stretch over two or three nights, sometimes over a week, a tale is finished in a single sitting, so several tales could be told one after another in one evening.

Taletelling is not considered an art learned through a master-apprentice relationship in the way of the minstrel or the meddah. The narrator usually learns a tale by hearing it from a mother, father, grandfather or grandmother, and one day tells the same tale to his or her own grandchildren. Talent matters on this path as much as memory. A skilled narrator can lengthen a motif, shorten it or even drop it deliberately without breaking the main framework, rebuilding the story to suit the listeners' interest and the mood of the night. The customs and traditions of the narrator's own region also find their way into the tale naturally. From the hero's birth to his wedding, many details bear traces of the traditions of the village or neighbourhood where the narrator lives.

The gender of taletellers has also been debated among researchers. Sakaoğlu holds that women were the chief keepers of the tale, noting that although the language has the term "tale mother", no counterpart such as "tale father" has taken root. Mustafa Gültekin, on the other hand, suggests that this assumption may be no more than a preconception; he reports that the 497 tales with identified source persons in collections published in Turkey were gathered from 305 taletellers, 171 of them men and 134 women. The picture in Amasya reflects the same variety. Among the master narrators from whom the tale scholar Oğuz Tansel heard tales in Amasya are named Emine Uyaroğlu, Menşur Dülger and Zakire Aytaç. The source persons of the legends collected in the region likewise include people of different ages and occupations, from housewives to farmers and from village headmen to young gardeners.

Opening, Linking and Closing Formulas

A tale never begins abruptly. The narrator first prepares the audience for the world of the tale, and does so with set phrases also known as the "döşeme" (the laying-out). Folklorists call these fixed expressions "formulas"; Boratav refers to the same elements as tekerleme and likens the opening rhyme of a tale to the "göstermelik", the decorative figure placed on the screen before a Karagöz shadow play begins. A plain opening runs "Once there was, once there wasn't, in olden times". More elaborate openings add internally rhymed lines listing impossible things, such as "when the sieve was in the straw, when camels were town criers and fleas were barbers, when I was rocking my mother's cradle to and fro". These phrases, built mostly on playful falsehood, both gather the listeners' attention and prepare them for the extraordinary events about to be told.

The name of Amasya appears in one of the best-known opening formulas of Turkish tales. After a lengthy rhyme proceeds with "We went a little, we went far, over hill and dale and plain, we went six months and an autumn", it continues: "Var varadan, sür süreden. From Amasya and from Tire. Eating bread and cheese where there was water, melons and watermelons where there was none, we reached the place we were bound for. And so we came to the tale…" This formula has found its way even into school textbooks, giving concrete form to the tale's sense of travel through the names of two cities at opposite ends of Anatolia. Whether the rhyme originated in Amasya is not known; the name seems to have been chosen here as one of two distant stages, for its sound and its feeling of the road.

There are set phrases in the middle of the tale as well. Moving from scene to scene, the narrator asks "From whom shall we bring the news", then turns the listeners' attention to the new event with "Let us come to the padishah's youngest son". When a long stretch of time must pass, the narrator compresses the years into a few words with the saying "Stories are slow to come together, masters bring them together quickly". Journeys are told as "They went a little, they went far"; sometimes travellers walk for six months and an autumn, then look back and see they have covered only the length of a packing needle. Using these formulas in the right place was regarded as the clearest sign of a narrator's mastery of language.

The end of a tale was tied up with at least as much care as its beginning. The hero defeats the giants and wins the girl he loves, a wedding is held for forty days and forty nights, and the wicked meet their punishment. The closing phrase that followed brought the listener back to the real world. The saying on the lips of Amasya's grandmothers, "They attained their heart's desire, let us climb onto our divan", was a gentle sign of this return. As in many parts of Anatolia, closings beginning "Three apples fell from the sky" were known here too; the apples were sometimes shared among the teller, the listener and the narrator himself, sometimes among the listeners and "the chatterbox who told it". A skilled narrator adjusted the length of the closing formula to the listeners' attention; faced with an audience that sensed the tale was over and had begun to laugh and chatter, he would simply break off without resorting to any formula at all.

The Heroes of the Tale World

The cast of the tales told in Amasya is the common cast of Anatolian tales. Giant mothers, Keloğlans, padishahs' daughters, the youngest of three brothers, witch-like old women and talking animals are the settled inhabitants of this world. In it goodness wins in the end, patience bears fruit, and arrogance and greed do not go unpunished. Because the characters of the tale are bound to no place or time, the same hero is reborn with small differences in Amasya, in Trabzon and in Konya; the narrator merely colours the details with the shades of his or her own surroundings.

The first work to set out the types of Turkish tales systematically is the catalogue Typen türkischer Volksmärchen, published in 1953 by Pertev Naili Boratav and Wolfram Eberhard. This catalogue classified 378 Turkish tale types and showed on which shared frameworks the narratives collected from different regions of Anatolia rest. More recently, the tales made accessible through the Turkish Tale Corpus project run by the Atatürk Cultural Centre have been grouped under headings such as "Magic/Extraordinary", "Realistic", "Animal", "Humorous" and "Chain". The fact that humorous tales form a separate group in this classification also shows how close the tale and the anecdote are. A short, comic narrative slipped in between tales on a winter night often stood on the border of the two genres.

On the surface, tales offer the narrator and the listener nothing but entertainment. Yet on the lips of Amasya's grandmothers the tale was at the same time a veiled lesson in morals. Adorned with rhymes, these narratives fed the child's imagination while also teaching honesty, courage and compassion. In the tales heard by adults a deeper reflection on justice, fate, poverty and wealth could be sensed. By leaving place and time undefined, tales opened a wide space in which every listener could find a piece of his or her own life.

Oğuz Tansel and the Tales of Amasya

One of the figures who played an important part in bringing the tales of Amasya into written culture is the poet, teacher and folklorist Oğuz Tansel. Born in 1915 in the village of Meyre in Konya and died in Ankara in 1994, Tansel was introduced to tales at an early age by his mother and, while studying at the Faculty of Letters of Istanbul University, became a student of the renowned tale scholar Pertev Naili Boratav. Collecting tales in various regions of Anatolia, Tansel also recorded the tales he heard in Amasya from master taletellers such as Emine Uyaroğlu, Menşur Dülger and Zakire Aytaç, and rewrote them for children in a style entirely his own.

The tales Tansel collected between 1959 and 1974 were published in turn in the books Altı Kardeşler (1959), Yedi Devler (1960), Üç Kızlar (1963), Mavi Gelin (1966) and Al'lı ile Fırfırı. With this last book he became, in 1977, the first writer to receive the Turkish Language Association's Children's Literature Award. He himself stated that he had arranged his books for readers aged 9 to 15, and that they could be read aloud to younger children in simplified form. Tansel said that he had rewritten the tales he collected "without changing their skeleton, according to his own view of the world". Their correspondence shows that his teacher Boratav did not approve of this rewriting, yet did not oppose it either, remarking that "every brave man has his own way of eating yoghurt".

Tansel's view of tales deliberately departs from that of the traditional narrator. Among the people, tales were most often told to put children to sleep or to soothe them. Tansel, however, says: "I do not write tales to lull children to sleep before bedtime. Tales are told to put children to sleep. I write tales to wake them up." His habit of closing his tales with formulas of his own, such as "Golden apples fell from the sky, all of them for the children" or "My blue apples to the children", is likewise a conscious reinterpretation of the traditional "three apples" formula. The narratives gathered from the lips of Amasya's taletellers have thus entered both the record of folklore and the lasting texts of Turkish children's literature.

The Anecdote and Folk Humour

Anecdotes hold a special place in the oral tradition of Amasya. Saying much in few words and making people think while they laughed, these short narratives served as a shield of humour that needled social shortcomings. Told in a corner of the coffeehouse, in wedding conversation or at a winter-night gathering in the guest room, anecdotes usually took a gentle swipe at injustice, stinginess or simple-mindedness through the mouth of a clever character. In these anecdotes the people's laughter was at once a consolation and a quiet criticism.

As everywhere in Anatolia, Nasreddin Hoca stands at the centre of the anecdote repertoire in Amasya too. The oldest manuscript containing the Hoca's anecdotes is the Saltuknâme of 1480, which includes two anecdotes attributed to him. The oldest independent collection whose date of composition is known, the Hikâyât-ı Kitâb-ı Nasreddin of 1571, contains forty-three anecdotes; the first illustrated edition was produced by Mehmed Tevfik in 1883 under the title Letâif-i Nasreddin. Although the number of stories attributed to the Hoca in anecdote books exceeds 500, those that can really be counted as his by accepted standards number around 300. In these anecdotes the arrows of mockery and criticism are aimed at every sphere of life, from home to street, from family to the courts, from the economy to authority; the Hoca's humour is constructive rather than destructive like satire.

The roots of the anecdote also reach back to the tradition of the meddah and kıssahan, the professional storytellers of Ottoman towns. From the fifteenth century onwards storytellers of this kind were common in Turkish society, above all in the large cities; over time they moved away from religious subjects, began to imitate the voices of animals and people, and inserted anecdotes into their narratives. Nineteenth-century meddahs, besides telling stories, also became masters of the orta oyunu folk theatre and of Karagöz shadow puppetry, bringing various character types to life in the coffeehouses. The couplet on the meddah in Fakîrî's Risâle-i Ta'rîfât, "Do you know what the meddah is in this world / He sets people right with one another", clearly expresses the place of these storytellers in society. It may be supposed that such storytellers were also found in Amasya, which for a long time lived a lively court and madrasa life as a princely sanjak; however, no document naming a meddah or kıssahan specific to the city has been found.

Anecdotes about the people of a region also show how a city sees itself and its neighbours. The harsh winter of Amasya has become the subject of one such anecdote. According to the story, people from different cities are thrown into hell one after another, and each cries out in his own dialect that he is burning. When it is the turn of the man from Amasya, not a sound is heard for half an hour. When they open the door to look, the Amasya man shouts: "Aman gardaş gapat, gapat. Börüm yeni yeni ısındı heri." ("For heaven's sake, brother, shut it, shut it. I've only just started to warm up.") The same anecdote is known to have been adapted to other provinces as well. In the Amasya version, what gives the anecdote its flavour are the local dialect's "gapat" and "heri", a word that carries no meaning on its own and is also heard frequently in the surrounding provinces.

Narratives Interwoven with Legend

In terms of legend, Amasya is one of the most fertile cities in Anatolia. The love of Ferhat and Şirin, the story of the water channels carved into the rocks, and the miracles connected with caves and tombs mingle with the tale in the people's speech. Among the legends most often cited in local records are Ferhat and Şirin, Güzelce Kız linked with the Mirror Cave (Aynalı Mağara), Kurtboğan, İğneci Baba, Serçoban and Lokman Hekim. Most of these narratives are tied to a place, a rock or a saint's grave, and their narrators believe them to be true. While no one believes in the marvels of the tale, the legend is a narrative that takes root in the landscape where the listener lives and explains that landscape.

The legends of the region have been collected and studied in two important academic works. Tuğrul Balaban's Amasya Efsane, Menkabe ve Memoratları, prepared as a doctoral thesis at Atatürk University and published by the Governorship of Amasya in 2014, is based on extensive fieldwork across the province. Ahmet Dağlı, in his study defended as a doctoral thesis at Ondokuz Mayıs University in 2012 and published as a book in 2023 under the title Yapısalcı Açıdan Amasya Efsaneleri, analysed ten legends he had collected in Amasya using the structuralist method. Because Dağlı's texts are given together with their source persons, they also show who has kept the storytelling tradition alive in the region. Among these narrators are a fifty-five-year-old housewife from the village of Derebaşalan, a thirty-four-year-old headman from the town of Aydınca, a seventy-six-year-old farmer from the village of Taşlıyurt and a twenty-six-year-old gardener from the village of Kızılkışlacık.

Some of these texts clearly show how the patterns of the tale fuse with the belief of the legend. The narrative of Resul Dede tells how the saint decided to build a mosque and a bathhouse for the village and carried the materials on the antlers of deer after midnight. His staff, believed to vanish in times of war and to return covered in blood, is the part of the legend that reaches down to the present. The narrative of Şeyh Sadi Baba relates that during the Persian campaign of Süleyman the Magnificent the sultan wintered with his army on the plain of Ezinepazar, summoned this holy man who roamed at night in the guise of a deer, had a copy of the Qur'an placed on the threshold of his tent to test him, and that the saint would not enter until the sacred book had been removed. According to another narrative, Hızır appears to anyone who performs his prayers without fail for forty days at the İmaret Mosque in Amasya. A young man who hears this prays there for forty days; at the ablution fountain an old man in a green turban approaches him, tells him that Hızır is the one from whose cupped hand water does not spill even when he spreads his fingers, and does exactly that before his eyes. Only after the old man has gone does the youth exclaim "So that was Hızır" and run after him, but he cannot find him.

The city's historical figures, too, live in this zone between legend and tale. In a narrative included by Mustafa Necati Sepetçioğlu in his Türk-İslam Efsaneleri and also examined by Dağlı, it is told that Şehzade Bayezid (Prince Bayezid), sanjak governor of Amasya and the prince who would later ascend the throne as Bayezid II, gave himself over to revelry and drink in his youth, and that his father Mehmed II (the Conqueror) could not turn him from this path. On a moonlit night a poor "madman" who lived in the rock hollows appears before him on the riverbank, throws a stone into the Yeşilırmak and tells him that the water where the stone fell is no longer the same water, and that time too flows away like this water. According to the story, the prince's "madness" left him that night and his "saintliness" remained. The old Amasya man who relates the legend tells the narrator, in a coffeehouse on the banks of the Yeşilırmak, that he heard this story from his grandmother, and she from her own grandmother. This chain is a small but clear example of how oral narrative is carried from family to family and from generation to generation. The events of the story cannot be confirmed by historical documents; however, the fact that Bayezid II later came to be known among the people by the epithet "Veli" (the Saint) suggests that the legend is a popular interpretation seeking to explain this epithet.

The Ritual of Telling and Its Social Role

Telling a tale had its own etiquette. The children fell silent, the elders listened, and the narrator lowered and raised his or her voice, bringing the characters to life through voice and expression. This interplay between listener and narrator also determined the course of the tale; if interest was keen the story lengthened and new adventures were added, while if attention wandered the narrator quickly tied the events together and brought it to an end. As one tale ended another was requested, and so the night stretched on from story to story.

These gatherings were in fact schools in which a society reproduced itself and renewed its values. Before ever starting school, a child learned the subtleties of the language, the pleasure of rhymed speech and the order of telling an event from beginning to end by listening to tales. For adults the anecdote was a way of voicing, with a smile, a criticism that could not be stated openly. The legend bound people to the place where they lived and gave meaning to the rock, the spring and the tomb. Folklorists find in each of these genres a community's helplessness, its hopes and its view of the world; Boratav regards legends in this respect as the products that best express the inner world of the people among all the genres of folk literature.

The Tale and the Anecdote Today

Today screens have largely taken the place of those stoves. Industrialisation and migration from village to city have narrowed the natural setting of oral narratives; as the master taletellers have passed away one by one, many tales have been forgotten without ever being recorded. Folklorists therefore see collection as one of their most urgent tasks. The tale is one of the genres that can be considered under the heading of "oral traditions and expressions" in the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, adopted by UNESCO at its 32nd General Conference in 2003. Within this framework, efforts to revive the tale through schools, libraries and trained storytellers have increased.

One of the most comprehensive initiatives in this field in Amasya is the "Masallarda Amasya" (Amasya in Tales) project, launched in April 2018 in cooperation between the Governorship of Amasya and the Provincial Directorate of National Education. Aiming to turn the city's historical, touristic, cultural and spiritual values into tales in a language children can understand, the project produced eight tale books for third- and fourth-grade pupils. Alongside eight thousand printed books, five thousand audiobook DVDs with sound and sign-language support were made for children with disabilities, as well as books printed in Braille for the visually impaired. The closing programme of the project was held in June 2019 at the Saraydüzü Barracks Building, home to the War of Independence Museum and Congress Centre, where the last book in the series, "Büyük Hazine: Amesia Bitiyor" (The Great Treasure: Amesia Is Ending), was screened as an animated film. These books are newly written educational texts rather than collections of traditional tales; even so, they show that the tale form is still regarded as one of the most effective ways for a city to tell its own story to its children.

At the national level, the Turkish Tale Corpus project launched by the Atatürk Cultural Centre in January 2019 opened 1,252 tales to public access on 21 December 2022, the longest night of the year. Of these, 300 were collected in the Black Sea Region and 385 in Central Anatolia. Hundreds of tales from the archives of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Turkish Language Association were also brought into the corpus, and more than 6,000 tales have been uploaded to the system.

Chronology

1480: The Saltuknâme, the oldest manuscript containing anecdotes of Nasreddin Hoca, was completed; it includes two anecdotes attributed to the Hoca.

1571: The Hikâyât-ı Kitâb-ı Nasreddin (43 anecdotes), the oldest Nasreddin Hoca collection with a known date of composition, was written.

1883: The first illustrated edition of Nasreddin Hoca's anecdotes, Letâif-i Nasreddin, was published by Mehmed Tevfik.

1953: Pertev Naili Boratav and Wolfram Eberhard's catalogue Typen türkischer Volksmärchen, classifying 378 Turkish tale types, was published.

1959-1974: Oğuz Tansel collected and published Anatolian tales, including those he heard from master taletellers in Amasya (Altı Kardeşler 1959, Yedi Devler 1960, Üç Kızlar 1963, Mavi Gelin 1966).

1977: Oğuz Tansel became the first writer to receive the Turkish Language Association's Children's Literature Award, for Al'lı ile Fırfırı.

2003: The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted.

2012: Ahmet Dağlı's doctoral thesis examining the legends of Amasya by the structuralist method was defended at Ondokuz Mayıs University.

2014: Tuğrul Balaban's collection Amasya Efsane, Menkabe ve Memoratları was published by the Governorship of Amasya.

2018: The "Masallarda Amasya" project was launched in April.

2019: The Turkish Tale Corpus project began in January; the closing programme of the "Masallarda Amasya" project was held in June.

2022: On 21 December, 1,252 tales collected within the Turkish Tale Corpus were opened to public access.

2023: Dağlı's thesis was published as a book under the title Yapısalcı Açıdan Amasya Efsaneleri.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Uslu, Esra, "Oğuz Tansel'in Masallarının Sosyal Beceriler Açısından İncelenmesi", Journal of Buca Faculty of Education, issue 53, 2022, pp. 341-360.

Official sources

  • Balaban, Tuğrul, Amasya Efsane, Menkabe ve Memoratları (Derleme-İnceleme-Metin), Governorship of Amasya Publications, Amasya 2014.
  • Oğuz, M. Öcal et al., Anadolu Masalları Tanıtım Programı, Ministry of National Education, Directorate General of Teacher Training and Development - UNESCO Turkish National Commission, Ankara 2019.

Books

  • Dağlı, Ahmet, Yapısalcı Açıdan Amasya Efsaneleri, Paradigma Akademi, Çanakkale 2023.
  • Sepetçioğlu, Mustafa Necati, Türk-İslam Efsaneleri, İrfan Yayınları, Istanbul 2005 (cited via Dağlı).
  • Editör Yayınevi, 9th-grade Turkish Language and Literature teacher's book, example of a tale opening rhyme.

Other sources

  • Nutku, Özdemir, "Meddah", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 28, Ankara 2003, pp. 293-294. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Altunel, İbrahim, "Kıssahan", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 25, p. 501.
  • Albayrak, Nurettin, "Nasreddin Hoca", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 32, Istanbul 2006, pp. 418-420.
  • Atatürk Cultural Centre, "Türk Masal Külliyatı Halkımızın Erişimine Açıldı", 2022.
  • Amasya Provincial Directorate of National Education, "Masallarda Amasya Projesi'nin Kapanış Programı Gerçekleştirildi", 27 June 2019.
  • Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, "Efsaneler" (Cultural Details collection).
  • "Oğuz Tansel" entry, Wikipedia (Turkish; supplementary source).
  • "Elmayı soya soya, Amasya'yı doya doya", Gazete Duvar (the hell anecdote adapted to Amasya).
  • "Anonim Halk Edebiyatı", YKS Edebiyat.
  • Doğan Kaya, "Efsane-Masal-Hikâye-Fıkra" collection.
  • Uşak Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, "Anlatmalar: Destanlar, Efsaneler, Halk Hikâyeleri, Masallar, Fıkralar".

Online sources