The minstrel tradition (âşıklık) is one of the oldest institutions to have carried the oral memory of Turkish culture across the centuries. Distilled from the circles of kams, baksıs and ozans of the pre-Islamic period, it changed form along a line running from Central Asia to Anatolia and lived in very different settings, from the dervish lodge to the coffeehouse and from the Janissary barracks to the village guest room. Amasya contributed to this tradition both in the Ottoman period, as a sanjak seat and a city of princes, and through a line of folk poets around Gümüşhacıköy, Merzifon and Suluova that reaches into the present. The minstrel who slung his saz over his shoulder and wandered from land to land was here, too, the spokesman of the people, the interpreter of their troubles and the carrier of their shared memory.

Roots of the Minstrel Tradition

Most scholars trace the cultural roots of minstrel literature to pre-Islamic Turkish culture. The ozan-baksı tradition grew out of an oral setting in which the kams were the performers; it continued after the adoption of Islam and, around the dervish lodge, gave shape to religious and mystical poetry. As the social structure changed, ozans who left the lodge and practised their art in everyday life came to be called âşıks. Fuat Köprülü places the beginning of this development in the sixteenth century and its settling in the late seventeenth; Özkul Çobanoğlu says that minstrel poetry broke away from the lodge and took shape in the coffeehouses that appeared at the end of the sixteenth century.

The term itself carries the trace of this long road. The word "âşık" in this sense is found in our literature from the fifteenth century, but it became common for secular saz poets only in the seventeenth. Earlier it had been a title used by lodge poets who wished to set themselves apart from those who sang secular verse; the appearance of the word in the sense of "Hak âşığı" (lover of God) in poems signed Yunus Emre points to this. Dede Korkut, for his part, is regarded as the first great minstrel type, reciting lineages and tribes to the accompaniment of his kopuz, and is remembered in the tradition as the patron saint of minstrels.

The relationship with the Ottoman palace changed over time. According to an assessment prepared for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Mustafa Âli speaks of those who sang varsağı in the reign of Murad II, but because the poetic taste of his own age was divan poetry, he does not count them as poets. With the imperial tradition that settled in from the time of Mehmed the Conqueror, the separation between the people and those in power sharpened, and minstrels remained outside the sphere of life of the palace and the ruling class. Even so, sultans such as Murad IV and Mehmed IV are known to have shown interest in minstrels, and Evliya Çelebi mentions the minstrels of the places he visited in his Seyahatname, giving the impression that by the seventeenth century Anatolia had become a homeland of minstrels. According to the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam, the place and importance of minstrels in Ottoman life continued until the last years of the empire and declined from the end of the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz.

The Poet as Voice of the People

The minstrel is the one who says what the people cannot say and sees what they cannot see. Love, separation, exile, anger at injustice, famine, flood and epidemic, war: he gives voice to all of these mostly in syllabic meter and in quatrains, with the seven, eight and eleven-syllable patterns being the best-known measures of the tradition. Reciting verse to the accompaniment of the saz is called singing "from the string" (telden), and reciting without it, singing "from the tongue" (dilden). The tradition expects of a minstrel, besides verse, the ability to play music and tell stories. Minstrels who narrated folk tales such as Kerem and Aslı or Âşık Garip in sessions that lasted for days also contributed to shaping the imagination and historical consciousness of the people.

The training of this art rests on the master-apprentice relationship. The young candidate wanders for years beside a master, attends the saz sessions and storytelling gatherings, memorizes the poems of earlier minstrels and of his master, and learns improvisation (irticalen, that is, unprepared verse), the technique of transmitting works that belong to the master, and the rules of pleasing an audience. When the apprenticeship is complete, the master gives the minstrel a pen name (mahlas) and in this way his mastery is certified. The pen name often replaces the real name, as with Dadaloğlu, whose real name was Veli, and Sümmânî, whose real name was Hüseyin.

Alongside this there is the belief in the bâdeli minstrel, the one who has drunk the cup. According to popular belief, some minstrels drink a cup from the hand of a pir in a dream and, on waking, find themselves able to compose verse. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam relates this account in detail: a pir named Hızır, İlyas or Kutub offers the minstrel three cups in a dream and then shows him the face of a beloved; on waking, the minstrel, under the influence of the dream, sets out after his beloved. Even so, drinking the cup or being born with a gift for poetry was not regarded as sufficient, and a long apprenticeship was also required. The life story of Ahmet Abacı, one of Amasya's twentieth-century minstrels, likewise contains the motif of being called to a dervish lodge through a dream.

Saz, Session and Contest

The inseparable companion of the minstrel tradition is the saz. Saz types, known by names such as bağlama, divan, bozuk and çöğür according to their size, are regarded as an extension of the minstrel's own voice; a minstrel who does not play the saz has hardly been considered acceptable in Anatolia. In earlier times saz poets were also called "çöğürcü" because they most often played the çöğür. In the tradition, the drum and zurna count as instruments of feasts and celebrations, while the saz in the minstrel's hand is the vehicle of a more inward world of words. In the folk music of the Amasya region, instruments such as the kaval, sipsi and def also have their place, but the string of the saz still stands at the centre of the minstrel's art.

Minstrel sessions (fasıl) were held in village squares, in vineyards and gardens, in coffeehouses, in mansions and, later, in wedding halls. The place of the session is called the meydan or divan. At these sessions the person presiding first introduces the minstrels; the minstrels introduce themselves with their own autobiographical verses, that is, they perform the ağırlama, and someone distinguished by the beauty of his voice opens the session by reciting a kalenderî. Then the gezinti, the doğmaca, the nazire and various forms of folk poetry are performed in turn. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam writes that a full session consisted of twelve main forms corresponding to the twelve zodiac signs: taksim, peşrev, divan, the aruz-based semâi, kalenderî, müstezad, methiye, satranç, koşma, the syllabic semâi, mâni and destan. In an age without radio or television, such a day was one of the rare entertainments to arrive from outside for the local people, and session days were therefore regarded as special.

The best-known side of minstrelsy is the contest (atışma). Two or more minstrels speak back and forth before the audience; on a given ayak, that is, a rhyme and melody pattern, they improvise verse and test one another with question-and-answer or narrow ayaks. It is said that the minstrel who loses hands his saz to the winner and that the winner usually gives it back; this gesture is read as a show of magnanimity signalling the continuity of the minstrels' guild, because it could even happen that the loser never again came forward to the divan. There is also leb değmez ("lips do not touch"): verse recited without the labial and labiodental consonants, that is, the sounds b, p, m, f and v, with a pin held between the lips. The muamma is a riddle poem that conceals a name, and solving it demands knowledge and wit; according to traditional accounts, whoever solved a muamma hung up in a coffeehouse collected the money gathered from the public. After each fine line the listeners answer with "aşkolsun" (bravo), and thus become partners in the contest.

This repertoire does not live in the same form everywhere. As the musicologist Melih Duygulu notes, minstrels raised within Alevi-Bektashi communities do not engage in contests; in their repertoire genres such as the deyiş, nefes, duvaz, semah and the mersiye sung for Karbala come to the fore. This distinction is meaningful for Amasya as well, since the minstrels of the region have to a large extent come from an Alevi-Bektashi background; Alkaç, Abacı and Çulha, who served as zakirs at cems, are examples.

Gaziler Ovacığı and the Minstrels of Amasya

In Amasya the minstrel tradition has lived with particular strength in the area covering Gümüşhacıköy, Merzifon and Suluova, which the local people call "Gaziler Ovacığı" (the Little Plain of the Veterans). The fertile plain opening east of the district towards Merzifon, most of which can be irrigated, is known by this name, and Alevi-Bektashi culture is also widespread in this setting. The names of minstrels raised in the region are listed in one study as follows: Âşık Musa, Kul Fakir, İsa Gedik, Rıza Çulha, Ahmet Abacı, Halil İbrahim Alkaç, Âşık Engunî, Dursun, Dervişoğlu, Biçare, Sıdkî, Kul Hasan, Esrarî, Derviş Edna, Turab Ali, Caferî, Hızır Sersem, Gülamî, İskender Haki, Kul Hüseyin, Fukara Derviş, Âşık Yıldız, Âşık Veli, Fehmi Dedeoğlu, Çoban Hüseyin, Abdullah Doğan, Mehmet Karagöz and Âşık Özlemî. This list shows that the art of the minstrel in the region did not remain tied to a single master but was carried on by many voices over generations.

The Yassıçal area is also part of this line. A minstrel from the village of Yassıçal (Ebemü) in Amasya, whose real name was Hüseyin Gümüş and who used the pen name Fedaî, died in 1940. The poet Fedai Koç, born in 1956 in the village of Sarımeşe (Efte) in Amasya, took his name from this minstrel and practised his art under the pen name Fedaî; Âşık Reyhanî, whom he regarded as his master, gave him this pen name. Pir Sultan Abdal, Sümmânî, Karacaoğlan, Âşık Veysel, Âşık Mahzunî Şerif, Seyrânî and Erzurumlu Emrah are also mentioned among those he accepted as masters. After marrying he went to Germany, where he worked as a truck driver in a factory; in his poems he treated themes such as homeland, exile, longing, martyrdom, Gallipoli (Çanakkale), Sarıkamış and the Republic, and he also wrote about earthquakes. In 2003 he published a book of 80 poems titled "Azad Eyle" and he died in Samsun on 4 March 2024; his grave is in the Amasya central cemetery.

Âşık Musa Aslan of Merzifon is also among the recorded names of this tradition. According to Haluk Yücel's musical analysis published in 2021, Musa Aslan appears in the records as a source person and nine of his pieces are included in the THM Repertoire of the TRT Music Department Publications. This is a concrete example of regional songs entering the repertoire of the state radio from a minstrel's memory. Âşık Özlemî of Gümüşhacıköy, for his part, was born in 1957 in the village of İmirler under the name Muammer Badem, became an apprentice of Mahzuni Şerif and is known for the folk song "Değme Felek"; his life and art are told in his own biography on this site.

Saz Poets of Amasya in the Ottoman Period

The most important source for tracing the minstrel tradition of Amasya in the Ottoman period is Abdizade Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar's Amasya Tarihi. While Prince Ahmed was governor of Amasya (1481-1511), Shah Ismail took Erzincan in 1501 and marched past Sivas toward Tokat, which created tension in the city; the celebrations of the Shah's supporters led to quarrels with the Turks. Figânî İshâk Çelebi (d. 1507), a descendant of Torumtay, wrote a destan satirizing the Persians and the Shiites in order to bring the matter to the attention of the prince-governor, who was busy with entertainment, and this destan was recited among the people. The text and details of the destan are unknown, but its topicality and its performance among the people suggest that it served a function similar to that of minstrel-style destans.

Yasar distinguishes the folk poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries from the pen poets; he names Cihâdî, Hüznî, Seyfî and Garibî and notes that their mânis and melodies were very plaintive. From the seventeenth century the description of "saz poet" becomes clearer. Celâlî Mehmed Ağa (d. 1658), presented as a sipahi with a powerful voice and an imposing presence, sang destans and recited poems to the accompaniment of the saz-bağlama in the coffeehouse called "Yüksek Kahve" (the High Coffeehouse) in Amasya. Âşık Ahmed Çelebi (İmâm-zâde, d. 1676) is remembered for his devotion to saz and verse, and Cihâdî Ahmed Ağa (d. 1682) as a Janissary minstrel and a saz poet who raised the morale of the army, with many destans, mânis and melodies to his name.

The line continues in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Âsafî Ahmed Beg (d. 1770), known as Çırçırlıoğlu, was famous for his bağlama playing among the Janissaries and the Bektashis. Âşık Mehmed Ağa (d. 1805), nicknamed Odabaşıoğlu, sang destans to the accompaniment of the çöğür, was raised in the Janissary corps, was stressed as being useful in campaigns, and performed his works in the coffeehouse at Selağzı, also known as the Garibler Mescidi. Süleyman Çelebi (Şânlı Ağa, d. 1820), who used the pen name Şânî, was a destan poet of the Janissary corps; Yasar writes that he obtained one of his destans but that it was lost in a fire. Abdal Ağası-zâde İsmail Hakkı Efendi, a contemporary of Yasar himself, is praised as a bağlama poet who knew many destans and mânis.

What stands out in this list is its connection with the Janissary corps. According to Cavit Güzel's assessment, because Amasya was a city where princes were raised, Janissary units were stationed there, these units supported minstrels, and minstrels were in turn regarded as charged with raising the Janissaries' morale. The weight of Alevi-Bektashi culture in the city also fed the destan tradition. One note of caution is needed: none of these poets' works is cited in Yasar's book, and no poem of any of them has been found in other sources either. In other words, for the Amasya minstrels of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries we know their names, their trades and the qualities attributed to them in contemporary records, but we do not know their poems. Beyond the similarity of the names, no link has been established between the Yüksek Kahve and the high coffeehouse that appears in Osman Fevzi Olcay's "Amasya Hatıraları".

Itinerant Destan Singers in the Age of Print

With the spread of the printing press, minstrel-style destans began to be printed on single sheets of paper and sold. In periods when there were no newspapers or when they were under censorship, these broadsheets were a means of announcing events. Fires, floods, epidemics, murders, plane crashes and political events became the subject of destans, and the destan singers recited them to a tune and sold them in towns and city squares. According to Çağdaş Yusuf Akbulut, itinerant destan singing spread from Istanbul to Anatolia and was at its most intense between 1940 and 1960.

The recordable representatives of this tradition in Amasya belong to the middle of the twentieth century, and the editions of the Nurlar Press in Merzifon are decisive among them. Halil İbrahim Alkaç was born in Gümüşhacıköy in 1934. As a child he listened to the destan singers who came to the village and began to follow them around; his father sent him to the zakirs of the region, where he learned to play the bağlama and to sing makam-based folk songs. Having had his first destans printed and sold before going into military service, Alkaç carried on for a while as an itinerant destan singer after his service and then began working as an attendant at the Postal Administration in Samsun. After the 1980s he gave up this work because public interest declined and because he could not continue destan singing alongside a civil-service post; he died in 1994.

His earliest dated destan identified in the National Library records is "Bafra'ya Düşen Aziz Uçak Şehitlerine" (To the Martyrs of the Plane That Fell at Bafra), dated 11 July 1959. In the same year "Tavşan Dağlarını Mateme Boğan Kanlı Hadise Kahpece Vurulan İki Kardeşin Destanı", "Kuyucak'ta Kocası Tarafından Vicdansızca Öldürülen Talihsiz Melek" and "Konyalı Alduvaklı Gelinin Destanı" were printed. "Şanlı Ordumuzun Zafer Destanı", which he wrote for Cemal Gürsel, is dated 14 July 1960; in the following years came "Türk Jetleri Kıbrıs Semalarında" (1964), "Ankara'da Öldürülen Eski Amasya Milletvekili Faruk Çöl'ün Destanı" (1965) and "Oku da İbret Al" (1965), written together with Yusuf Değirmenci. All of the destans are in eleven syllables and vary between twelve and twenty-four quatrains. The theme of death predominates, but the political and military developments of the time are also treated. In some destans Alkaç lets the hero of the event speak, that is, he has the pain told in his voice; in others he behaves like a narrator looking at the event from outside.

Ahmet Abacı was born in 1934 in the village of Sarıyar (Morami), attached to the central district of Amasya. He lost his mother at the age of seventeen and said that after returning from military service he came to himself and fell in love with minstrelsy. According to his account, following a dream he went to the lodge of Keçeci Baba (Gül Ahi Baba) in the Erbaa district of Tokat, where his tongue was loosened; then, following another dream, he went to Hacıbektaş, to the tomb of Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli. He states that he became a Hak âşığı after 1955 and that in those same years he also worked as an itinerant destan singer. Among the destans identified are "Toros Dağlarında Ölen Kâmil, Sıddık ve İbrahim Üç Şehitlerin Destanı" and "Ahiret Sözleri ve Ana Baba Öğütleri", both printed in 1959, and a destan printed in 1961 about a killer who murdered his mother with a cleaver in the village of Kızılca. The first has fourteen quatrains and the second sixteen, and in the second, unlike in his destans on the theme of death, an admonitory, wisdom-laden tone is seen.

In the information he gave a researcher in 2018, Abacı also described how itinerant destan singing worked. He said that a destan with a sorrowful subject drew the customer more, that when they heard of an event they went straight to the door of the print shop and quickly composed the destan there, that they filled bags with the printed sheets and travelled as far as Ankara, Istanbul, Antalya, Samsun, Erzurum and Sivas. He adds that, being unable to keep up with the sales, he hired two children by the day to hand out sheets while he sang. He recounts that at first the relatives of the dead were angry with them, but later they themselves asked for destans to be written for the dead. The sale followed a set order: an address to the crowd, self-introduction, the subject of the destan, the other places where the destan was sold, an intermediate greeting and then the destan performed to its tune. The announcement was kept in verse as far as possible, and the accompaniment was first the bağlama and later a battery-powered tape player.

Rıza Çulha, from the same village of Sarıyar, was born in 1939 and began minstrelsy under the influence of the Amasya artist Burhan Özbakır, who came to their village. He says that since the age of fourteen he has sung the inspiration that comes from Hak. He turned the severe rain, hail and flood disaster that struck Merzifon in 1959 into a destan of thirteen quatrains titled "Yağmur, Dolu ve Sel Felaketi" (The Rain, Hail and Flood Disaster), which was printed at the Oniki Haziran Press in Amasya. The only work of İsa Gedik that can be identified is the fifteen-quatrain "Amasya'nın Keşli Köyünde Kocasını Uyurken Öldüren Katil Gelinin Acıklı Destanı" (The Sorrowful Destan of the Murderous Bride Who Killed Her Husband in His Sleep in the Village of Keşli, Amasya), dated 17 July 1969 and printed in Samsun; in the signature on the print he appears as "Folk Poet from the Village of Gümüşhacı, Amasya", and no information about his life could be found.

Examining these four names, Güzel notes that Alkaç, Abacı and Çulha were raised in an Alevi-Bektashi milieu, served as zakirs at cems, and turned the same artistic talent, according to the conditions of the time, toward the destan singing of the written-culture environment. Considering the link of the Janissary minstrels with Alevi-Bektashi culture, a continuity is seen between destan singing in the oral period and destan singing in the age of print. In the oral period minstrels performed the function of encouraging and motivating; in the print period they took on the functions of informing, advising and warning. The sufferings that took place in and around Amasya were recorded in destans, and the city took its place in folk literature as a place that both produced destan-singing minstrels and was itself the subject of destans.

The Minstrel Tradition Today

The Minstrel Tradition was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. In the Living Folk Poets database established by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 1986, 795 minstrels are registered; Âşık Şeref Taşlıova, Neşet Ertaş, Veli Aykut, Mehmet Acet and İsmail Nar, important representatives of the tradition, have been declared "Living Human Treasures". Today minstrels perform in minstrel coffeehouses in Central and Eastern Anatolia, where the tradition is alive, and in the big cities at minstrel festivals and at festivals organized by municipalities.

The electronic media environment, that is, records, cassettes, television and the internet, has brought new possibilities to the minstrel's art but has partly removed the most distinctive feature of the oral setting, the possibility of re-creation and variation in every performance. Researchers who have studied Özlemî, one of the region's minstrels, say that the master-apprentice tradition is eroding with the emergence of new conservatory-trained minstrels, and draw attention to the importance of recognizing and recording the tradition. That words once sung in Amasya in the Janissary barracks, in the coffeehouse or in front of the print shop now continue on festival stages and in folk song recordings shows the adaptability of the minstrel tradition to changing conditions.

Chronology

15th century: The word "âşık" begins to be used in literature in this sense.

1481-1511: Prince Ahmed's governorship of Amasya.

1501: Shah Ismail takes Erzincan; in Amasya Figânî İshâk Çelebi writes his satirical destan.

1507: Figânî İshâk Çelebi dies.

1658: The sipahi saz poet Celâlî Mehmed Ağa dies.

1682: The Janissary minstrel Cihâdî Ahmed Ağa dies.

1770: Âsafî Ahmed Beg dies.

1805: Âşık Mehmed Ağa dies.

1820: Şânî Süleyman Çelebi dies.

1940: Hüseyin Gümüş of Yassıçal, pen name Fedaî, dies.

1959: Destans by Alkaç, Abacı and Çulha printed in Merzifon and Amasya.

1986: The Living Folk Poets database is established.

2009: The Minstrel Tradition is inscribed on the UNESCO representative list.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Abdizade Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, ed. Mesut Aydın, Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2004. sbe.amasya.edu.tr

Academic studies

  • Özer, Şerife - Topal, Mustafa. "Âşıklık Geleneği ve Geleneğin Çerağlarından Amasyalı Âşık Özlemî". Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi 14/34 (2021): 652-665.
  • Güzel, Cavit. "Amasya'da Âşık Tarzı Destan Geleneği". Uluslararası Türkçe Edebiyat Kültür Eğitim Dergisi 9/3 (2020): 1089-1105.
  • Yücel, Haluk. "Merzifonlu Âşık Musa Aslan Türkülerinin Müzikal Analizi". The Journal of Social Sciences 53 (2021): 31-56.
  • Sargın, Hatice. "Amasyalı Fedai Koç (Ozan Fedaî) ve Sözlü Tarih Bağlamında Fedaî'nin Şiirleri". Sosyal Bilimler Araştırmaları 24, Sonçağ Akademi, Ankara 2025.

Official sources

  • Aydın, Suavi. "Âşık Müziği ve Gösterimleri". Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Türkiye Culture Portal, 2009.
  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, General Directorate of Living Cultural Heritage, "Âşıklık Geleneği".

Other sources

  • Albayrak, Nurettin. "Âşık". TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 3, 1991, pp. 547-549. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Duygulu, Melih. "Anadolu'da Âşıklık Geleneği ve Âşıklarda Müzik". Türkiye Müzik Portalı.

Online sources