Tokatlı Nûrî is a minstrel (âşık) who travelled through Central and Northern Anatolia in the mid-nineteenth century and is regarded as the best-known apprentice of Erzurumlu Emrah. His real name was Mahmud. His connection with Amasya runs along two lines: according to Eyüp Akman's entry in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, Nûrî was foremost among the minstrels honoured at the fair held in the city during Ziya Pasha's governorship of Amasya; and the Merzifon Cönkü published by Metin Hakverdioğlu gives him more space than anyone else, with thirty-six poems, and records that the person who often invited him to Merzifon was the Merzifon poet Eyüb Sabrî.

Life

Nûrî was born in the Kızılca quarter of Samyeli, one of the Alevî-Bektaşî neighbourhoods of Tokat. His date of birth is not certain: Ahmet Talat Onay, who carried out the first research on him, gives 1820-1830, and M. Zeki Oral the years 1824-1825. His father was Veli Hoca, who made a living as a teacher and a vine grower; Mahmud received his first religious instruction from him. He lost his father at the age of thirteen or fourteen and for a time led an unsettled life. He married a girl named Hâtun; from this marriage were born his children Arif, Ahmet, Nefise and Feride. His son Arif also became a minstrel and used the pen name Murûrî.

According to a story told among the people, Mahmud was playing the saz on the Gıjgıj hill, held sacred in Tokat, when a kick from the unseen sent him tumbling down the mountain; the next day in the market he was drawn by the voice of Erzurumlu Emrah playing the saz in a coffeehouse, Emrah called him to his side as "Nûrî", and from that day Mahmud became Emrah's apprentice. This story is a narrative, in the minstrel tradition, of receiving a pen name from a master and should not be read as a historical event. As a minstrel of the Emrah branch, Nûrî travelled through Sivas, Çankırı, Çorum, Ordu, Giresun and Samsun. Most is known of his activity in Çankırı: he came several times with his apprentices to the fair at Yapraklı and took part in poetic gatherings with the Çankırı poets Zahmî, Bezmî and Yesârî. Besides his son Arif he trained apprentices such as Ceyhûnî, Tıflî, Enverî and Gayretî.

The date of his death is also disputed: according to Ahmet Talat he died in Samsun in 1882, according to Zeki Oral in 1884. His grave is near the tomb of Şeyh Kutbeddin. His apprentice Ceyhûnî of Zile, who was with him when he died, delivered his belongings to his family in Tokat.

Connection with Amasya

Akman's entry counts Amasya among the places Nûrî visited and says that the years he spent there must have been after 1863. This dating rests on Ziya Pasha: the Pasha's governorship of Amasya falls in the years 1863-1865, and the entry records that during his governorship he organised in Amasya a fair similar to the one at Yapraklı in Çankırı and honoured the minstrels and poets present, foremost among them Nûrî. Ziya Pasha's years in Amasya are described on this site in the article Ziya Pasha's Amasya.

The connection on the Merzifon side falls in the same years. Drawing on Orhan Bilgin's 1992 book on two Merzifon poets, Hakverdioğlu relates that the young Merzifon poet Eyüb Sabrî, a friend of Ziya Pasha, often invited Tokatlı Nûrî to Merzifon and held conversation and poetic exchanges (müşaere) with him. Since Sabrî died in 1866, these visits belong to the first half of the 1860s. That Nûrî stands first, with thirty-six poems, in the Merzifon Cönkü, which Hakverdioğlu thinks was compiled in Merzifon within Sabrî's literary circle, is a concrete sign of the mark these visits left on the town's poetic taste.

Poetry

Nûrî is said to have been an unlettered minstrel, but his poems show that he received some education. In his syllabic poems he uses the eleven-syllable metre and a plain language; his themes are love, nature, faithlessness and complaint against life. According to Akman, his manner is more relaxed in his syllabic poems than in his aruz poems. In aruz he composed poems in forms such as the dîvân, kalenderî, semai, selis, satranç, murabba, muhammes, müseddes, elegy, spring poem and Ramadan poem; the influence of Fuzûlî is clearly visible in his poetry. He was also skilled in composing chronograms: the line he wrote on the death of his master Emrah, "Nûrî ne güzel söylemiş üstâdına rahmet", is the known example. He is known to have had a divan he wrote or had written down, but this divan is lost. His poems were collected about fifty years after his death by Ahmet Talat Onay and Zeki Oral from cönks, miscellanies and oral tradition. It was Nûrî, too, who gathered most of Erzurumlu Emrah's poems in a manuscript.

The Merzifon Cönkü contains thirty-six poems under Nûrî's name, eighteen koşmas in syllabic metre and eighteen poems in aruz. Among the aruz poems are dîvâns, kalenderîs, semais, a ghazal, a satrancî, a stanza with a refrain that Hakverdioğlu calls a "düstûr", and a six-line semai praising the Prophet Muhammad. The article published only the first verse unit of these poems; only for the koşma "Devrine aldanma sen bu dünyânıň" are the first two lines and the final quatrain given together. Hakverdioğlu also indicated the place of five of the aruz poems in Ahmet Talat's book on Tokatlı Nûrî. The first unit of each poem in the cönk is given on a separate page in this category, with its original text, a modern Turkish rendering and commentary.

State of the Sources

It is not easy to identify Nûrî's poems with certainty. Akman writes that there are many poems with the pen name Nûrî in cönks and miscellanies, but that they must be approached with caution, since other poets used the same pen name, such as the Nûrîs of Tosya, İskilip, Çankırı and Ilgaz and Dülekzâde Mehmet Nûrî of Kasaba. Moreover, because of the response poems he wrote to his master's poems, thirty-nine poems are recorded in the sources under the names of both Emrah and Nûrî. Thirteen of Nûrî's poems in the Merzifon Cönkü coincide by their refrains with poems on this shared list: "şimden gerü", "kader mi böyle", "ne çare", "bensiz yâr", "baş eğri", "âbâd olaydı", "teselli kaldı", "geç efendim geç", "garib garib", "canım efendim", "canımı yakma", "zevki var" and "mahalim yok". The cönk gives all of these poems to Nûrî; this record shows at least that in nineteenth-century Merzifon these poems were known as Nûrî's words. In the article's bibliography Ahmet Talat's book appears with the date 1993; in the references within the text and in Akman's entry the book is dated 1933.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

Online sources