In the centuries before electricity and screens, the most powerful entertainment that brought people together was telling and showing. In long-established centres of Ottoman urban culture such as Amasya, the long winter nights and the evenings of Ramadan came alive with the colourful world of traditional folk theatre. Its two strongest branches were the word of the meddah and the shadow of Karagöz. The one rested on the voice, the mimicry and the memory of a single person; the other was born of the shadows that coloured figures cut from leather cast onto a white screen in the light of an oil lamp. Both addressed the same audience, the townspeople who gathered in the coffeehouse, the mansion and the festival square, and both knew how to make that audience think even as they made it laugh.

Amasya's ties to these arts run along several paths. As an Ottoman sanjak capital and a city of princes, it was one of the places where palace culture was carried into the provinces, and its coffeehouses, mansions and Ramadan customs bore the public face of that culture. Amasya also entered the screen directly as the city in which one of the best-loved plays of the shadow theatre, Ferhad and Şirin, is set. Although no record of a meddah or shadow-puppeteer working in the city has so far come to light, the available sources make it possible to trace how storytelling and Karagöz reached Amasya and what place the city holds in the memory of these arts.

The Meddah: Name and Origins

The word meddâh, from the Arabic root madh, means "one who praises, who praises much"; the terms mâdih, medîhagû and medîhaserâ were also used. Over time the Ottomans came to use the word in place of kıssahan and şehnâmehan as well. According to a widespread view, the art began when Hassân b. Thâbit praised the Prophet in his poems. Evliya Çelebi, however, names Suhayb al-Rûmî, who praised the Prophet, as the patron saint of the meddahs; he writes that his real name was Abdülvehhâb Gâzî, that he recited the Antarnâme in the pre-Islamic age, that he received gifts from the Prophet for narrating the battles of Uhud, Mecca and Hunayn in his presence, that his belt was tied by Ali himself, and he records that his grave lies in Sivas. The fifteenth-century Persian author Husayn Vâiz-i Kâshifî likewise describes the meddahs as a company who recited the legends of the Prophet's family and loved his lineage above all others.

It would be incomplete to say that Turkish storytelling drew only on this Islamic root. Before their conversion to Islam the Turks already had folk performers who told stories; in the nomadic encampments they were called baksı or bahşı, and later ozan. The tales of the ozans were mostly verse narratives in syllabic metre, sung to the accompaniment of the kopuz. After the adoption of Islam these performers, now called âşık (minstrels), went on singing the epics of ancient heroes. While Arab meddahs largely kept to religious themes and praise, Turkish meddahs treated everyday subjects in a realistic manner, and this has led scholars to conclude that the art grew out of the Turks' own cultural store. Both Byzantine and Eastern sources show that ozans told stories and recited poetry at the Seljuk court and in the army, and the ozans, boon companions and performers present at the Ottoman court from the very beginning led the way in the development of the meddah's art.

In time the meanings of these words blurred. One who told kıssa (edifying tales) was a kıssahan, one who read the stories of the Shâhnâme a şehnâmehan, the early narrators who recited hymns and eulogies at gatherings were muarrif, and those who told of the Prophet's life and the Islamic conquests were siyerci. As these narrators drifted away from religious subjects and, to hold their listeners, began imitating animal sounds and human manners and telling witty and sometimes bawdy stories, the differences among them faded. In the end all of them came to be called meddah, regardless of what they narrated.

From the Palace to the Coffeehouse

The first meddahs known by name in the Ottoman world appear at the end of the fourteenth century at the court of Bayezid I. Kör Hasan, who made the sultan laugh with his mimicry and wit; Yûsufî, author of Varaka and Gülşah, one of the oldest known meddah tales; and Hacı Sâdî of Kastamonu, who wrote the Tales of Abû Muslim in 1362 and dedicated them to Bayezid, are counted among the famous meddahs of the period. The same list includes the name of Ahmedî, poet of the İskendernâme. Information on Ahmedî's life is scattered and inconsistent; some sources make him a native of Germiyan, others of Sivas, and it is known that he remained attached to Emir Süleyman until the latter's death and then tried to enter the circle of Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed). The sixteenth-century biographer Mecdî records that Ahmedî died in Amasya at an age of more than eighty. Thus the last years of this great poet, who is remembered among the first Ottoman meddahs, are linked to Amasya, even though their details remain uncertain.

In the fifteenth century, during the reign of Murad II, Hacı Kıssahan of Bursa was a well-known performer. A salary register of 1478 tells us that the palace of Mehmed II (the Conqueror) included the boon companions Balaban Lâl and Ömer and a kıssahan named Mustafa. From the same period we also know of a meddah called Halil and a kıssahan who gathered the Hamzanâme into twenty-four volumes and recited it, taking the pen name Hamzavî for this reason. Although the kıssahans had not received a regular madrasa education, they were clever and talented people with a literary upbringing. Those in mansions and palaces served sultans and statesmen as companions and boon companions; with an apt witticism they could dispel their master's anger even at its height, and at times they conveyed the wishes of the people upward. In the seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi puts the number of meddahs who served as companions to sultans, viziers and the wealthy at about eighty, and describes them as narrators who went about with staffs in their hands and books at their waists, speaking with eloquence and grace. Lâlin Kaba, the famous meddah of the reign of Murad III, is depicted in a miniature of the period.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century the number of meddahs and their functions in society steadily grew. The meddahs of the nineteenth century had also mastered orta oyunu and the playing of Karagöz in addition to storytelling. Kız Ahmed, Kör Osman, Piç Emin, Âşık Hasan, Nazif, Tespihçioğlu and Musâhib Nûri are well-known names of that generation. Kız Ahmed's fame reached as far as Europe, and the English artist Thomas Allom drew him in the act of telling a story. Piç Emin was the master of important meddahs such as Camcı İsmâil. Mürekkepçi İzzet and Lüleci Mehmed are remembered for their wit, Yağcı İzzet and Şükrü Efendi for their skill; İsmet Efendi, trained by Şükrü Efendi, surpassed his master, and at the end of the century the most famous meddah was another of his apprentices, Aşkî. Sürûrî, regarded as the greatest meddah of the twentieth century and known among his friends as "Ayı Kemal", first appeared before the public in Makasçılarbaşı in the Ramadan of 1900, soon moved to Şehzadebaşı, and worked as a meddah for thirty-four years. It is no surprise that this chain of masters was concentrated in Istanbul; the names of meddahs in provincial towns were seldom written down, and the memory of the narrators who travelled from town to town on Ramadan nights survived in popular recollection.

The Meddah's Tools and the Art of Narration

At the heart of the meddah's art, counted as one of the four main branches of traditional Turkish theatre, lies narration in place of showing. A meddah was a stage, a company and a story all in one person. He sat on a raised stool where the audience could see him easily, gathered his listeners' attention with the stick in his hand, and made use of the same stick when describing animals such as a horse or a donkey. Over his shoulder lay a large handkerchief, the makreme; he draped it over his head like a headscarf when imitating a woman and held it to his mouth to alter his voice. Using his voice and his mimicry with great skill, the meddah made the types in his story speak one after another in their own accents and manners, drawing his listeners into the tale. The people gathered in coffeehouses, mansions and festival squares laughed, grieved and took lessons through his words.

These two simple tools are the remnants of a long history. The early meddahs kept beside them a spear, a standard (tuğ) and a small axe (teberzin). Tradition held that the spear had come down from the Negus, king of Abyssinia, and it was also called elif, for it was thought that only those as upright as the letter elif could bear it. The meddahs gave a meaning to every letter of nîze, the Persian word for spear: that the light of love should shine on his brow, that his faith should be complete, that he should renounce the adornments of the world, and that he should stand by the believers and friends. The tuğ was a spear bearing a pennant, and the people gathered wherever it was planted; the axe was carried against anyone who would obstruct the praise. In time the spear and the standard turned into the stick, and the şedde into the makreme. According to Kâshifî, foremost among the meddah's possessions was the stool, whose upper two legs symbolised knowledge and world view and whose lower two symbolised patience and resolve.

The meddah opened his tale with a set introduction, preparing his listeners with an ornate prelude beginning "Sühensâz-ı gülistan-ı nezaket, nihâl-i gonce-i bağ-ı zerafet". At the end he tied up the story with the words "This tale was written in the margin of an anthology; we saw it and we told it", asked pardon for any slip of the tongue and promised an even better story next time. Pausing at the most exciting point of the tale to collect money from the audience was another well-known refinement of the tradition. In his Risâle-i Ta'rîfât, Fakîrî expressed the meddah's place in society with the couplet "Do you know what the meddah is in this world? / One who sets the people right with one another." To foreign observers the meddah was at once poet, historian, teller of tales and author of legends; he gave voice to the humour, feelings and longings of his own people.

The Meddah's Repertoire and the Dânişmendnâme

The meddah's stories drew on everyday life, tales, epics and legends. Folk romances such as Ferhad and Şirin, Leylâ and Mecnun and Arzu and Kamber, real events heard about town and incidents gleaned from neighbourhood gossip were refashioned in his hands. In an older layer stood the great epic romances of the kıssahans. Reading aloud books such as the Muhammediyye, the Battalnâme and the Hamzanâme in coffeehouses was an established custom. The Abû Muslimnâme was also among the favourite texts of this circle.

The link in this epic cycle most closely connected with Amasya is the Dânişmendnâme. Regarded as the first heroic epic composed in Anatolia with a Turkish hero, the work narrates Danişmend Gazi's conquests in the Yeşilırmak basin and reaches its climax with the capture of the castle of Harşana (Amasya). Efromiya, daughter of the castle's lord Şâh-ı Şettât, becomes a Muslim out of her love for Artuhi and fights in many battles almost as Danişmend Gazi's right arm. According to tradition, the epic was compiled in 1245 by İbn Alâ, on the order of the Anatolian Seljuk ruler Kaykâwus II, from the legends circulating among the ghazis, but no copy of this first redaction has survived. The manuscripts that exist today belong to a second redaction by Ârif Ali, castellan of Tokat, who reworked the text and divided it into seventeen sessions (meclis). Evliya Çelebi notes that even in the seventeenth century the legends of Danişmend Gazi lived on among the people of that region. Since this text is closely bound to the Battalnâme and the Abû Muslimnâme, it is reasonable to think that, like its sister epics, it was read by kıssahans in coffeehouses and mansions; but no document is known concerning a particular narrator who recited the Dânişmendnâme in Amasya. The work's value as a historical source is also disputed: many historians, from Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî to Hüseyin Hüsameddin, author of the Amasya Tarihi, used it as a genuine chronicle, Mükrimin Halil Yinanç dismissed it as a book of superstitions, and Irène Mélikoff, taking a position between the two, showed that the text contains important historical clues.

The Arrival of the Shadow Play in the Ottoman World

The shadow play is an art that spread across a wide area of the Ottoman lands and influenced neighbouring cultures, but its origin was long debated. The deep-rooted shadow theatre of the Chinese and their relations with the Turks of Central Asia led some scholars to believe that the play came from Central Asia. Yet the shadow play was unknown among the Central Asian Turks; the word hayal in çadır hayal, the name of the Uzbeks' string puppet, may have caused this misunderstanding. The view that the play came from India with the migrations of the Romani does not hold either, for although the Romani moved westward in the eleventh century, no trace of the shadow play is found in Anatolia before the sixteenth. Others have linked it to the Roman mime or to the commedia dell'arte. The words hayal and hayalbâzân found in earlier sources were used for puppets, and scholars mistook them for the shadow play.

The path indicated by the documents runs through Egypt. The Mamluk historian Ibn Iyâs relates in his history of Egypt, Badâ'i' al-zuhûr, that after Selim I (Selim the Grim) took Egypt in 1517, a shadow-player performed before him in the palace on the island of Rawda (Roda) in the Nile, re-enacting the hanging of the Mamluk Sultan Tumanbay II at Bâb Zuwayla and the rope snapping twice. Selim was so delighted with the play that, wishing his son Süleyman to see it too, he summoned the performer to Istanbul. Some six hundred Egyptian artists came to Istanbul with Selim; some returned home after three years, while others stayed. In Egypt the history of the shadow play reaches back to the eleventh century, and German museums held Egyptian figures dating from the twelfth. Sixteenth-century Ottoman documents, for their part, describe it at length as a new entertainment and call it hayâl-i zıll.

The Mamluk figures were monochrome and opaque, worked with arabesque motifs. In the seventeenth century Turkish artists, with their skill in leatherwork, made these figures translucent, coloured them and gave them movable joints. The structure of the Egyptian plays, made up of disconnected scenes, was also reorganised into a new form. The name Karagöz appeared in that century, and the play, enriched with Turkish humour, with divan, folk and dervish poetry, with art and folk music and with the dances of çengi and köçek performers, became a mirror of Ottoman society. The play's name also changed over time; names such as çadır hayal, zıll-ı hayal and hayâl-i zıll gave way to that of its principal hero. Karagöz did not remain in Anatolia; it spread through the Ottoman lands from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon to Romania, Yugoslavia and, at a later date, Greece.

Karagöz and Hacivat

Two traditions claim that the screen's two principal figures were real people. According to a tradition that Evliya Çelebi dates to four hundred years before his own time, Karagöz was Sofyozlu Bâlî Çelebi, the Romani groom of the Byzantine lord of Istanbul from Kırkkilise (Kırklareli), and Hacivat was a man named Yorkça Halil who lived in the reign of the Seljuk Sultan Alâeddin. The more widespread tradition, kept alive among the puppeteers themselves, moves the story to Bursa in the time of Orhan Gazi. According to it, during the building of a mosque Hacivat worked as a mason and Karagöz as a smith; their witty exchanges kept the other workers from their tasks, the construction fell behind, and the sultan had both of them beheaded. To ease the grief of the remorseful sultan, a man named Şeyh Küşterî later cut their figures from leather and played them behind a screen. No document supports any of these traditions; the first records on the subject date from the sixteenth century, and even they do not mention the name Karagöz. The accounts of Şeyh Küşterî also contradict one another. Nevertheless these stories led to the claim that a grave in the Çekirge quarter of Bursa belongs to Karagöz, and in 1993 to the erection of a large statue of Karagöz in Kırklareli.

The two unchanging characters of the play are exact opposites. Karagöz is an honest man of the people who says what he thinks, and for that reason he is shunned, often unemployed and forever in trouble. He speaks in a deep voice and raises laughs by misunderstanding the ornate words of the educated, or by twisting them on purpose. Hacivat is a scheming, well-spoken Istanbul gentleman who adapts himself to everyone's temper, mediates in everyone's troubles and smooths things over; he speaks in a thin voice, in a language studded with Arabic and Persian words. The bickering of Karagöz and Hacivat carried the everyday speech, humour and tolerance of the people onto the screen. The contrast is reflected in the figures as well. Karagöz is round-faced, snub-nosed and large-eyed, with a rounded beard; red dominates his dress, while his knee-breeches are blue. Hacivat's features are sharper, his face thin, his beard pointed and his eyes smaller, and his jacket and headgear are painted green. According to the puppeteer Mustafa Mutlu, green is the colour of learned and educated people. Özdemir Nutku drew attention to the resemblance between the headgear of the two heroes and that seen on the Hittite rock relief at İvriz.

Around the two main characters lives a crowded Ottoman neighbourhood. The children of Karagöz and Hacivat, their wives who never appear on the screen, Hacivat's brothers and Karagöz's witch of a Romani mother form its first circle. The spendthrift dandy (çelebi), the addict (tiryaki) and the beberuhi speak, like Hacivat, in the polished Istanbul idiom. The woodcutter from Kastamonu, the cook from Bolu, the men from Kayseri, Karaman and Eğin, the Laz or Black Sea man and the Kurd speak in the dialects of their own regions. The Persian, the white and the black Arab, the Albanian, the Rumelian, the Tatar and the Romani represent those who came from beyond Anatolia; the Greek, the Armenian, the Jew and the Levantine Frank represent the non-Muslim neighbours. The hunchback, the stammerer, the deaf man, the madman, the opium smoker, the bully and the drunkard are frequent guests of the screen as well. Each type arrives with its own tune: the music begins, and when it is halfway through the figure appears on the screen. The man from Kayseri dances the spoon dance, the Rumelian the sirto, the Black Sea man the horon. The Laz is either a sailor carrying hazelnuts in his boat or a tinsmith, cotton-fluffer or tobacconist, and often holds his kemençe; the Albanian appears as a boza-seller, gardener or field watchman. The Karagöz screen is therefore like a colour photograph fixing the dress, speech and temper of the communities that made up the empire. The tensions of people who rubbed against one another in the market and the bazaar by day dissolved in the evening as the audience laughed at the foibles of the types that stood for them on the screen.

Screen, Figures and the Puppeteer

Karagöz is in fact the performance of a single artist. This artist, called the hayalî or usta (master), is at once an actor who gives voice to every character from women and children to the various regional accents, a director who sets the entrances, exits and tempo of the play, a choreographer who arranges the dances and movements, and a painter who cuts and colours the figures. A hayalî was expected to command pure Istanbul Turkish, a well-developed gift for mimicry and the knack of improvised speech called tuluat, to know Turkish music, to sing the songs of the types and to speak the various dialects. He is assisted by a helper called the yardak, who hands the master the figures in the order of their entrance, joins the music on the tambourine and produces the play's sound effects.

The white screen on which the play is performed is called the ayna (mirror). Its dimensions changed over time: screens that were once about two metres by two and a half are said to have later been made at 110 × 80 centimetres, and screens of roughly 1.80 × 0.80 metres are also mentioned. Below the screen, on the inner side, is the peş tahtası, a ledge. An oil lamp or candle once served as the light source, later an electric bulb. The figures are made from camel or water-buffalo hide with long labour: the hide is cured and made translucent, the figure drawn on it is cut out on a block of linden wood, the pieces are jointed with fishing line and coloured with natural dyes. A figure is worked by one or two horizontal rods fitted into holes; a vertical rod called the fır döndü allows it to turn left and right. The göstermelik placed on the screen before the play begins is a static figure, often unrelated to the subject of the play, used to put the audience in the mood. Cymbals, tambourine, the whistle called nareke and the reed pipe are also among the hayalî's tools.

Each hayalî creates his own figures by adding only details to the conventional appearance of Karagöz and Hacivat. The folds at the sleeves and hem of the jacket and the patterns of the sash and headgear vary from master to master. Karagöz and Hacivat also change costume according to the subject of the play: as a boza-seller one carries a saddlebag on his back and a ewer in his hand, as a wrestler he wears leather breeches, as a clerk he puts on a fez and takes on the guise of a nineteenth-century gentleman, and in Ters Evlenme he becomes a bride. Yet at the end of the play each always returns to the screen in his familiar form. Like the meddah's art, the craft of Karagöz was handed down for centuries within the bond of master and apprentice; how a word or a figure was to be used could be learned only with patience, through years spent at the master's side.

The Parts of the Play and Its Music

Every Karagöz play consists of four independent parts: the mukaddime (prologue), the muhavere (dialogue), the fasıl (the play proper) and the bitiş (epilogue). In the prologue, after the göstermelik is removed, Hacivat comes onto the screen and sings a semai and the screen ghazal. After a short exchange with Karagöz the two heroes come to blows. The dialogue that follows is a verbal duel between Karagöz and Hacivat on a particular subject that can be stretched out as long as desired. Hacivat's ornate sentences and Karagöz's answers that misread them are the funniest part of the play. To lengthen the performance, interludes involving several characters could also be added. In the fasıl, the main part, a story is enacted, and in the epilogue Hacivat and Karagöz close the play with a short exchange, Karagöz asking the audience's pardon for any slip of the tongue.

The subjects of the plays go back a long way and have reached the present by passing from generation to generation. Among them are classic love stories such as Ferhad and Şirin, Leylâ and Mecnun and Tâhir and Zühre; seventeenth-century plays such as Kanlı Nigâr and Hamam; and fantastic subjects such as Cazular and Kanlı Kavak. Many new plays were added later. Cevdet Kudret published the repertoire accumulated from the beginnings to recent years in three volumes, as thirty-nine plays and nineteen dialogues.

Karagöz also has a music that became bound by rules over time. The figures are often moved to the accompaniment of the puppeteer's tambourine, to which cymbals, jingling tongs and whistles may be added. Karagöz music proper, however, consists of pieces performed by an ensemble apart from the puppeteer on folk and classical instruments. The opening piece played with the göstermelik, Hacivat's semai, Karagöz's screen ghazal and the hayal songs sung by the types during the play make up this repertoire. The existence of songs whose composers are unknown and which are sung only in Karagöz plays suggests that they were composed especially for the screen. Etem Ruhi Üngör published 215 of the hayal songs together with their notation.

Amasya on the Screen: The Play of Ferhad and Şirin

Amasya's most distinctive place in the history of the shadow play is the play of Ferhad and Şirin. The story grew out of Nizâmî Ganjavî's Khusraw and Shîrîn and in time became an independent masnavi subject. The first separate treatment centred on Ferhad is Ali Shîr Navâ'î's Farhâd and Shîrîn, written in 1484. In the Ottoman sphere it was followed by the Ferhâd ü Şîrîn that Şehzade Korkut (Prince Korkut), born in Amasya, wrote under the pen name Harîmî, by Lâmiî's Ferhâdnâme, completed in 1512, and by Şâmî's Ferhâdnâme in the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent. Selim I is said to have been so pleased with Lâmiî's work that he granted the poet a village. When the story passed into folk literature its geography changed as well. In the folk romance told in Anatolia and Azerbaijan the events begin in Khorasan and continue in Amasya; Şirin's other suitor ceases to be the king of Iran and becomes Hüsrev, son of Hürmüz Şah, ruler of Amasya. As Ferhad is about to bring water to the city through the mountain, the nurse, disguised as an old woman, tells him the lie that Şirin is dead, and he takes his own life; Şirin dies at his side. Legend has it that every spring, between the red and the white rose that bloom on the lovers' grave, the nurse grows as a black thornbush to keep them apart. These legends survive in Amasya today, attached to certain place names; the ancient water channel carved into the city's rocks is popularly known as the Ferhat Water Channel, and the local traces of the story are discussed in detail in our article on the legend of Ferhat and Şirin and the water channel.

Because of its popularity the story was also carried onto the Karagöz screen and into orta oyunu, but on the screen it took on an entirely different form. In the Karagöz play the story is shortened, the events are altered and it ends happily instead of in tragedy. As always, the adventure takes place in front of Karagöz's house. On the side of the house a mound of earth is seen, on Hacivat's side a kiosk. When Karagöz asks what they are, Hacivat tells him of the birth of Şirin, daughter of a merchant living in Amasya, and of how she and Ferhad, who painted the decoration of the kiosk built at her wish, fell in love. The kiosk is Şirin's, and the mound is Elmadağı, the mountain Ferhad must pierce. Ferhad and Şirin meet on the screen for a while; when Şirin leaves, Ferhad pours out his trouble to Hacivat, and Hacivat asks the mother for the girl's hand. The mother at first refuses outright, then says she will give him her daughter if he pierces Elmadağı and brings water to thirsty Amasya. Ferhad pierces the mountain with the pickaxe Karagöz gives him. The mother, unwilling to give her daughter to Ferhad, sends an old woman to tell him that Şirin has died; Ferhad kills the old woman in his rage, and just as he is about to take his own life, Şirin arrives and the two lovers attain their wish.

In the Karagöz repertoire this play also appears under the titles "Fasl-ı Ferhâd" or "Ferhad and Şirin, or the Treacherous Mother". Its verse passages are not the same as the poems of the folk romance; like them, they are mostly in quantitative (aruz) metre, with some in syllabic metre among them. Some couplets, chosen to suit the situation, are taken from Fuzûlî and other great divan poets. The play's life in the Arab lands also bears the name of Amasya. In the mid-nineteenth century the orientalist Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, then Prussian consul in Damascus, wrote down an Arabic shadow play performed there and translated it into German. Published after Wetzstein's death, in Leipzig in 1906, the text bears the title Die Liebenden von Amasia, "The Lovers of Amasya", and its subtitle presents it as a Damascene shadow play. A love story set in Amasya was thus performed in Arabic in Syria, where Ottoman Karagöz had spread, and entered the first scholarly collections of Karagöz plays made in Europe.

The story's stage career continued in the twentieth century. The folk romance had first been printed by lithography in Istanbul in 1854, followed by illustrated lithographs and editions in movable type. The Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli arranged it as an opera in 1912. In 1948 Nâzım Hikmet wrote his play Ferhad and Şirin in Bursa Prison; this play, however, stays within the triangle of Mehmene Banu, Şirin and Ferhad and leaves out the second half of the story, the part concerning Hüsrev and Hürmüz that takes place in Amasya.

Orta Oyunu and the Other Performing Arts

Karagöz's sibling in the open square is orta oyunu. Also known as kol oyunu, meydan oyunu and zuhûrî kolu, this play is performed in a round space encircled by spectators and has no written text. The players carry only an outline called the kanava in their heads, and the lines are improvised. Its two heroes, Pişekâr and Kavuklu, are the counterparts in the square of Hacivat and Karagöz on the screen: Pişekâr is the well-spoken figure who directs the play, while Kavuklu is its chief comedian. In the dialogue one player gives a cue called the key or the "female word", and the other answers with a comic retort called the "male word". In this sense orta oyunu is an arena of words resting more on repartee than on action. Ferhad and Şirin was also played in orta oyunu, but here the subject is simplified still further: people from various regions come looking for work at the smithy that Pişekâr has opened for Kavuklu, Ferhad, the last to arrive, is chosen as the painter to decorate Şirin's kiosk, Elmadağı is pierced with the pickaxe Kavuklu gives him, and the play ends with preparations for the wedding.

The name orta oyunu first appears in Lebîb's Sûrnâme, written for the wedding of Sâliha Sultan in 1834; the play became widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cevdet Kudret identified eighty-three play titles in the orta oyunu repertoire. As the intellectuals of the Tanzimat turned towards Western theatre, this art was not counted as theatre at all and was even considered harmful. Although figures such as Teodor Kasap and the Hungarian Turkologist Ignácz Kúnos argued that a national theatre would be born of Karagöz and orta oyunu, urban orta oyunu steadily lost its importance, and its last great representative, İsmail Dümbüllü, died in 1973. Village orta oyunu, by contrast, played in the winter months and at weddings and festivals in Anatolian villages, has continued to live on in many regions.

The Coffeehouse, Ramadan and Mansion Gatherings

The true stage of both the meddah and the hayalî was the coffeehouse. Coffeehouses, which appeared in Istanbul in the 1550s, soon spread throughout the empire, to the mosque sides of small towns and as far as the villages. In a society where written culture did not reach the broad public, the coffeehouse was the principal place where oral culture was sustained. Books such as the Muhammediyye, the Battalnâme and the Hamzanâme were read there, chess and backgammon were played and newly written poems were debated. The coffeehouse was also the most important venue for Karagöz and meddah performances and for minstrels to display their skills. In the minstrel and meddah coffeehouses the performers entertained the regulars while passing on a store of culture to them. For this reason, Kâtib Çelebi reports, coffeehouses were called mekteb-i irfan, "schools of learning", and medresetü'l-ulemâ, "colleges of scholars". In some coffeehouses that took the name kıraathane (reading room) after the Tanzimat, Karagöz performances and music sessions on Ramadan nights became carriers of the culture of the late period. The coffeehouse tradition and conversational culture of Amasya are described separately in our article on the coffeehouse and conversation culture of Amasya.

Karagöz had become especially identified with Ramadan. The screen set up after the fast was broken and after the tarawih prayers dispelled the weariness of the fasting day with laughter and turned children and adults alike into a single audience. Circumcision feasts and gatherings in mansions were the screen's other stages. In a sanjak capital such as Amasya, the prince's palace, the mansions of the beys and the ulema and the coffeehouses of the bazaar tradesmen were natural settings for such entertainments. Yet no document has been found showing in which year, in which coffeehouse or by which hayalî a screen was set up in Amasya. For now the city's relationship with these arts can only be inferred from general Ottoman practice, from the structure of Amasya's urban culture and from oral memory. The meddah's art also shared common ground with the telling of tales and anecdotes in Amasya; the stories told by the stove on winter nights and the tales told in the coffeehouse were two faces of the same oral culture. This domestic storytelling tradition is discussed in our article on the tales and anecdotes of Amasya.

The common aim of these arts was to teach a moral lesson while entertaining the people. Behind the laughter of a Karagöz play there was often a subtle message about custom, tradition and moral understanding. Karagöz's plea for the audience's pardon at the end of the play and the meddah's request for forgiveness for any slip of the tongue as he closed his tale were the courtesies of an art that bore the responsibility of the spoken word. As Fakîrî's couplet has it, what was expected of the meddah was that he set the people right with one another.

The Last Century of the Tradition and Amasya Today

In the twentieth century radio, cinema and then television took the place of the narrator and the screen in the coffeehouse. The meddah and Karagöz withdrew from the coffeehouse to school halls, cultural centres, festivals and museums. Both arts came under international protection: the meddah's art was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, and Karagöz in 2009. A Karagöz museum was founded in Bursa, and good puppeteers and figure-makers, few as they are, have continued to be trained.

In Amasya, too, the tradition lives on today mostly through performances for children and on special occasions. Before the Ramadan feast of 2022 the spiritual support unit of Amasya University Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin Training and Research Hospital brought children undergoing treatment together with a Hacivat and Karagöz performance; Karagöz was played by the actor Orhan Bol, and the children were given presents after the show. In the Ramadan of 2026 five young women who had completed a sign-language course run by the Amasya Mufti's Office and the Amasya Public Education Centre appeared at Mehmetçik Primary School dressed as Karagöz, Hacivat and Nasreddin Hoca and performed the hymn "Kâbe'de Hacılar" in sign language. This small performance, in which the costumes had to be worn in turn because there were no spares, is one of the recent examples showing that Karagöz and Hacivat have stepped down from the screen and live on in the bodies of live performers.

Today it is not easy to see in Amasya a meddah who begins his tale by striking his stick on the floor of a coffeehouse, or a hayalî setting up his screen on a Ramadan night. Yet the city's name remains written into the screen in one of the best-loved plays of the shadow theatre, the story of Ferhad piercing Elmadağı. The word of the meddah and the shadow of Karagöz recall the grace of a city that holds laughter and reflection together. The mansion gatherings and coffeehouse assemblies of Amasya were the stages of this tradition of narrative and shadow, and the mark they left endures in the city's sense of humour and its love of storytelling.

Chronology

1245: According to tradition, İbn Alâ compiles from legends the Dânişmendnâme, which also recounts the conquest of the castle of Harşana (no copy of the first redaction survives).

1362: Hacı Sâdî of Kastamonu writes the Tales of Abû Muslim and dedicates them to Bayezid I.

After 1411: According to Mecdî, the poet Ahmedî, remembered among the meddahs of Bayezid I's reign, dies in Amasya at an age of more than eighty.

1478: The boon companions and the kıssahan Mustafa at the court of Mehmed II are entered in a salary register.

1484: Ali Shîr Navâ'î writes Farhâd and Shîrîn, the first separate treatment centred on Ferhad.

1512: Lâmiî completes the Ferhâdnâme.

1517: Selim I watches a shadow play in Cairo and has the performer brought to Istanbul.

1550s: The first coffeehouses open in Istanbul.

17th century: The figures become translucent and gain joints; the name Karagöz appears.

1834: The name orta oyunu first appears in Lebîb's Sûrnâme.

1854: The folk romance Ferhâd ü Şîrîn is printed by lithography in Istanbul.

1900: The meddah Sürûrî first appears before the public in Makasçılarbaşı during Ramadan.

1906: The shadow play collected by Wetzstein in Damascus is published in Leipzig as Die Liebenden von Amasia.

1912: Uzeyir Hajibeyli arranges Ferhad and Şirin as an opera.

1948: Nâzım Hikmet writes his play Ferhad and Şirin in Bursa Prison.

1973: İsmail Dümbüllü, the last great representative of orta oyunu, dies.

2008: The meddah's art is inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

2009: Karagöz is inscribed on the same list.

2022: A Hacivat and Karagöz performance is staged for children undergoing treatment at a hospital in Amasya.

2026: Volunteers dressed as Karagöz and Hacivat give a sign-language performance at a primary school in Amasya.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • "Meddah", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 28, Ankara 2003, pp. 293-294 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/meddah). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Kıssahan", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 25 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/kissahan). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Karagöz", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 24, Istanbul 2001, pp. 401-403 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/karagoz). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Orta Oyunu", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 33, Istanbul 2007, pp. 400-402 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/orta-oyunu). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Ferhad ve Şirin", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 12, Istanbul 1995, pp. 388-389 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/ferhad-ve-sirin). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Dânişmendnâme", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 8, Istanbul 1993, pp. 478-480 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/danismendname). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Ahmedî", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2, Istanbul 1989, pp. 165-167 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/ahmedi).
  • "Kahvehane", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, EK-2, Ankara 2019, pp. 3-5 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/kahvehane).
  • Işınsu Ersan, "Karagöz Perdesinde Osmanlı'nın Tasvir'i", Sanat Dergisi, Faculty of Fine Arts, Dokuz Eylül University.
  • Ragıp Muhammed and Nazlı M. Ümit, "Arapça Karagöz Oyunlarında Türkçenin İzi", Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı - Belleten, 75 (2023), pp. 83-100.

Other sources

  • Mustafa Mutlu, "Karagöz" (article).
  • Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, Die Liebenden von Amasia: Ein Damascener Schattenspiel, ed. G. Jahn, Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1906.
  • "Gölge Oyunu ve Özellikleri", turkedebiyati.org.
  • Wikipedia (Turkish), articles "Karagöz", "Meddah" and "Ferhad ile Şirin (oyun)" (auxiliary source).
  • "Hastanede çocuklara Hacivat-Karagöz'lü bayram sürprizi", İhlas News Agency, 30 April 2022.
  • "Genç kadınlar, Karagöz ile Hacivat olup 'Kâbe'de Hacılar' ilahisini işaret diliyle sahneledi", İhlas News Agency, 13 March 2026.
  • Traditional folk theatre: Karagöz, orta oyunu, meddah and village performances (eodev.biz, from the existing source list).