Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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Another architect who specialised in the (re)-construction of ecclesiastical

buildings was Nicolaos Komnenos (1770–1821), who repaired the Church of

the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after it had been damaged in a major ﬁre in

1808. Originally from Mytilene/Midilli, Nicolaos Komnenos had established

himself in Istanbul, where he restored several churches before receiving the

prestigious Jerusalem commission. Possibly the title basilikos that he bore in an

inscription referred to his membership in the sultan’s corps of architects; his

work in Jerusalem demonstrated his familiarity with the decorative repertoire

of ‘Ottoman baroque’.

114

Thus the churches built or rebuilt both in the capital

and in the provinces during this period should be included within the corpus of

structures displaying the stylistic innovations typical of late eighteenth-century

Ottoman architecture.

Around 1800: the centre and the provinces

Because of ﬁnancial difﬁculties in the reign of ‘Abd

ulh

amid I (r. 1774–89), the

ruling elite were encouraged to help in the construction and repair of fortresses

and other public structures. This was something of a novelty, for down to the

mid-eighteenth century military architecture such as fortresses or city walls

had almost never been entrusted to individuals; the v

alide Turhan Sult

an who

fortiﬁed the Dardanelles must count as the exception proving the rule.

115

But

in 1784 Grand Admiral Cez

ayirli Hasan Pas¸a commissioned the new navy

barracks (Kalyoncu Kıs¸lası) in Kasımpas¸a and paid for the construction out of

his personal funds. At the same time, the sultan’s entourage was considerably

enlarged, and the delegation of architectural enterprise made an incorporation

of new courtiers possible despite mounting military and political pressures.

On the Anatolian shore, the Beylerbeyi mosque, with its courtyard situated

on the waterfront and its veranda for latecomers a two-storey kiosk (1778),

exempliﬁed the new social atmosphere, in which the sultan was expected to

meet a larger number of people.

116

‘Abd

ulh

amid I’s reign wasrelatively poor in termsof architectural patronage,

although he did build more than survives to the present day, and ‘Ottoman

baroque’ really came into its own during this period. In the Topkapı Palace,

the sultan ordered the construction of several chambers, whose decoration is

114 Martin Biddle, The Tomb of Christ (Phoenix, Mill, Thrupp and Stroud, 1999), p. 103.

115 Lucienne Thys-S¸enocak, ‘The Ottoman Fortresses of Sedd

ulbahir and Kumkale’, in

Aptullah Kuran ic¸in yazılar: Essays in Honour of Aptullah Kuran, ed. C¸i

gdem Kafesc¸io

glu,

Lucienne Thys-S¸enocak and G

unhan Danis¸man (Istanbul, 1999), pp. 311–23.

116 Kevork Pamukciyan, ‘Hassa mimarı Edirneli Agop Kalfa’, in Zamanlar, mek

anlar, ed.

Osman K

oker (Istanbul, 2003), pp. 146–8.

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Arts and architecture

unfortunately difﬁcult to date. By contrast, his successor, Sel

ım III (r. 1789–

1807), was much more ambitious. Apart from rebuilding the Ey

up mosque

(1798–1800), the reforming sultan commissioned one of his own on the hills of

Usk

udar, the Selimiye (1804), close to the enormous barracks which also bear

his name. This mosque should be regarded as part of the new movement in

Ottoman architecture that had begun with the Nuruosmaniye.

117

A link to this

latter building may also be due to family connections, for the architect, Foti

Kalfa, was the son of Simeon Kalfa who had worked on the Nuruosmaniye;

the two men claimed descent from the imperial Byzantine Komnenos dynasty,

with what justiﬁcation remains unclear.

118

Furthermore, Sel

ım and his sisters

employed Antoine-Ignace Melling for a number of projects, including the

manufactureof objets d’art and architectural enterprises.Apart from designing

Had

ıce’s royal villa at Defterdarburnu, other palaces of the princesses were

recorded by Melling in ﬁne drawings. These included Beyh

an’s mansion at

Akıntıburnu and Hibetull

ah’s at the far end of the Golden Horn. Melling

also drew the sultan’s Bes¸iktas¸ Palace, where he undertook rebuilding and

renovations.

119

Late eighteenth-century residential architecture:

historicism in the provinces

Certain provincial building projects shared features well-known from imperial

architecture;however, since the magnates sponsoring them have left no written

documentation, we continue to puzzle over the meanings that may have been

attached to such parallelisms. Thus in Aydın the Cih

ano

glu mosque (1756)is

approached by a grand staircase which resembles that adorning the Ayazma

mosque in

Usk

udar, begun a year later. The Cih

ano

glu mosque is set obliquely

on an artiﬁcial platform raised above low arcades with pointed arches. The

ablutions fountain forms a decagon decorated with ten panels. The interior of

the mosque is rather overwhelmed by stucco decoration with vegetal motifs

and arabesques.

Provincial styles of the late eighteenth century allowed for an interest in

local forms that had often preceded the ‘classical’ architecture that sixteenth-

and seventeenth-century patrons had imposed. This predilection has been well

117 Arel, Batılılas¸ma s

ureci; Pamukciyan, ‘

Usk

udar’daki Selimiye cami‘inin mimarı kimdir?’.

118 Pamukciyan, ‘Foti Kalfa’ya dair iki kaynak daha’.

119 MM Treuttel and W

urtz (eds.), Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore:

d’apr

es les dessins de M Melling, architecte de l’Empereur Selim III, et dessinateur de la Sultane

Hadidge sa sœur (Paris, 1819).

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studied in the case of Egypt, but it existed elsewhere as well.

120

In Aydın this was

a rather novel style marked with baroque and rococo embellishments of the so-

called Italian school, but mixed with rather anachronistic Gothic forms, whose

source remains completely unknown. Attributing this hybrid style to Greeks

who had ﬂed to western Anatolia before and after the Morean revolt of 1770,

Arel has characterised this mixture as a ‘family style’ of the Cih

ano

glu, whose

mosques and mansions show remarkable similarities.

121

The fortiﬁed estates

or manors of eighteenth-century western Asia Minor seem to be linked to

indigenous medieval walled-in residential complexes featuring ‘towers’, which

in unsettled times may have functioned as keeps or donjons. Such mansions

were apparently adopted by the Cih

ano

gulları to document their local roots,

while reserving the more ofﬁcial canon for their mosques.

122

By contrast the

late eighteenth-century

Ishak Pas¸a Sarayı, on the Iranian border, harked back

to medieval building traditions ingeniously combined with features derived

from the Topkapı Palace.

123

In the Ottoman architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

the survival of established conventions was thus accompanied by the devel-

opment of new elements and combinations of motifs. It makes sense to high-

light the creativity of late Ottoman builders and patrons, who invented or

imported architectural features whenever they felt that the ‘classical tradition’

had exhausted itself. This richness and complexity is not well described by the

conventional catchall categories of Westernisation and decline; instead, we

need to examine written texts to track down the often elusive motivations of

patrons and architects.

120 Cerasi, ‘Problem Speciﬁcity’.

121 Ayda Arel, ‘Aydın ve y

oresinde bir

an ailesi ve mimarlık: Cihano

gulları’, in Osmanlı’dan

Cumhuriyet’e: problemler, aras¸tırmalar, tartıs¸malar. I. uluslararası tarih kongresi 24–26 Mayıs

1 993 (Ankara) (Istanbul, 1998), p. 187.

122 Ayda Arel, ‘18.ve19.y

uzyıl Ege d

unyasında ikonograﬁk izlek ve kalıplar’, in Sanat

tarihinde ikonograﬁk aras¸tırmalar: G

uner Inal’a arma

gan (Ankara, 1993), pp. 21–9,ﬁgs.1–9.

123 Mahmut Akok, ‘A

grı-Do

gubeyazıd’da

Ishak Pas¸a Sarayı r

ove ve mimarisi’, T

urk Arke-

oloji Dergisi 10, 2 (1961), 30–48;Y.Bing

ol,

Ishak Pas¸a Sarayı (Istanbul, 1998).

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Ottoman literature

hatice aynur

Introduction

Productive writers and poets were numerous during this period; and many

texts, literary approaches, forms and genres could rightfully be discussed.

However, due to limits of space, we will here present merely a small selection.

As poetry was the literary expression par excellence in the Ottoman world,

we will largely limit ourselves to poems. A contemporary Bosnian author by

the name of Al

aedd

ın S

abit (d. 1714) was much aware of the great popularity of

poetry when he claimed that there was a poet under every paving stone.

will pay only passing attention to prose, as it was less practised as an art form,

and has been little studied by present-day scholars. The task of the literary

historian becomes even more difﬁcult because the history and cultural history

of this period are still very little known.

In comparison with both the 1500s and the 1800s the literature of the sev-

enteenth and eighteenth centuries has been much neglected.

It is generally

assumed that the sixteenth century marks a high point in Ottoman literary

life: at this time authors writing Turkish in both prose and verse stopped

being simple imitators of their Iranian masters. As for the seventeenth cen-

tury, we often read that apart from one or two gifted writers, the earlier level

was not maintained. In the eighteenth century too we supposedly encounter

a widespread dissolution or degeneration of the established literary forms,

a process that announced the profound changes in mentality, form, genre

1 For general information on Ottoman poets and writers, their works as well as the relevant

secondary literature, see Ag

ah Sırrı Levend, T

urk edebiyatı tarihi, vol. I: Giris¸, 2nd edn

(Ankara, 1973); Andreas Tietze and Georg Hazai, Turkologischer Anzeiger (Vienna and

Budapest, 1975–); Hatice Aynur,

UniversitelerdeEskiT

urkedebiyatı c¸alıs¸maları: tezler,yayınlar,

haberler (Istanbul, 1991–).

2 Bosnalı Alaeddin Sabit, Divan, ed.Turgut Karacan (Sivas, 1991), p. 306.

3 This relative neglect of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is apparent from the

anthology superbly edited by Ahmet Atilla S¸ent

urk: only twelve out of sixty-eight authors

selected ﬂourished during the period in question: Osmanlı s¸iiri antolojisi (Istanbul, 1999).

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and topic that were to characterise Ottoman literature in the nineteenth

century.

By comparison with earlier and later periods, Ottoman literature of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries presents some peculiar problems. To

take but one example, we need to ask ourselves how literary intentions that

in earlier times had been expressed by the frequent composition of poems of

the mesnev

ı genre were translated into reality in our period. For by now few

poems of this kind were being written, and those that did see the light of day

differed substantially from their predecessors in terms of topic; as yet the fate

of the mesnev

ı remains unstudied and the relevant problems unresolved.

At ﬁrst glance, Ottoman literature may appear homogeneous; but once

we look more closely, we encounter authors, works and topics that differ

very much among themselves. Even completely contradictory positions and –

obviously – people who detest one another are by no means rare. Change

over time is certainly not absent, and cannot be described merely as ‘decay

and dissolution’. Thus from the seventeenth century onwards many writers

show a tendency to refer to the environments in which they themselves lived,

instead of taking these references largely from their literary models; thus it has

been said that Turkish poems ‘struck roots’ in the Ottoman lands. Between

1617 and 1627 Nev‘

ız

ade ‘At

ı wrote ﬁve mesnev

ıs, known as the Hamse-i ‘At

ı,

which, in a manner not seen in previous examples of the genre, evoke the city

of Istanbul and its inhabitants. On the other hand, the question of authorial

personality is now more prominent. Thus we might expect Ned

ım (d. 1730)and

Levn

ı (d. 1732), who both maintained close contact with the palace during the

reign of Ahmed III (r. 1703–30), to write poems in a similar vein. But in reality

the words and forms that they favour, the symbols they refer to and the people

about whom they write are all derived from quite different sources. To what

extent may these variations be due to the authors’ differing backgrounds and

educations? To what extent may the fact that Levn

ı was a trained miniaturist,

and thus had workshop experience, account for the special character of his

poetry?

Ottoman Turkish as a language

Especially during the sixteenth century, one of the most important and strik-

ing changes experienced by the Turkish language involved the massive entry

of Arabic and Persian words. At the time this certainly was considered an

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Ottoman literature

enriching addition, even if today we may see this phenomenon in rather a

different light.

An interesting indicator of the change of linguistic taste among educated

seventeenth-century Ottomans is the recasting of older texts by the writer

Cevr

ı (d. 1654–5).

Cevr

ı had evidently studied in a school training people in

Islamic law and theology (medrese), but it is less clear whether he ever entered

state service.

He certainly made a living by his beautiful calligraphy, which

was greatly esteemed by high-ranking Ottomans. Over a century after the

writer’s death, Selim III presented a mesnev

ı in Cevr

ı’s handwriting to the poet

S¸eyh G

alib, who expressed his joy and gratitude in a special kas

ıde.

Cevr

rewrote the work known as S¸emsiyye by Yazıcı Sel

ahadd

ın, dating from 1408,

under the new title of Melhame; he also revised the Sel

ımn

ame of Bitlisli S¸

ukr

ı,

ﬁrst composed in 1521, in the latter case retaining the original title. In both

instances Cevr

ı explained his procedure: the language of these works being

‘ancient Turkish’, everybody had long desired such a recasting, and therefore

he had undertaken the job. Turkish words were replaced by their Persian

or Arabic counterparts, the titles rendered entirely in Persian and the text

was both abridged and extended. Evidently Cevr

ı felt that his predecessors’

language was old-fashioned, and he substituted words of Arabic and Persian

provenance that he had internalised and that had become common currency

among the literati. His rewriting of the Sel

ımn

ame in 1627 was encouraged or

even commissioned by K

ose ‘Al

ıPas¸a, who had felt that the words were true

but that there was no spirit to the original verse, and that it was therefore

4 Two authors, one from the sixteenth and one from the nineteenth century, both exem-

plify this point of view. In a text written in 1592, Gelibolulu Mustaf

a‘

ı had the fol-

lowing to say about the Turkish language: ‘In fact the astonishing language current

in the state of Rum, composed of four languages [West Turkish, C¸a

gatay, Arabic, and

Persian], is a pure gilded tongue which, in the speech of the literati, seems more dif-

ﬁcult than any of these...and,intheviewofthose eloquent in Turkish, the use of

simple Turkish should be forbidden’: Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in

the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustaf

a‘

Ali, 1541–1600 (Princeton, 1986), pp. 253–4.

For the nineteenth century we will quote the opinion of Ziy

aPas¸a, statesman, intel-

lectual and literary ﬁgure (1825–80): ‘Certainly Turkish is an incomparable language, but

Persian has doubled its beauty, and the two languages are in perfect harmony. Two seas

of knowledge and mystical inspiration have come together and have formed an even

larger sea. In addition earlier on, Persian had been perfected by Arabic, so that now the

three seas together formed an ocean; and this ocean was called the Ottoman language’:

Ziy

aPas¸a, Har

at (Istanbul, 1291/1874), vol. I, pp. 8–9 (Mukaddime, translation by the

author).

5 H

useyin Ayan, Cevr

ı: hay

atı, edeb

ı kis¸ili

gi, eserleri ve divanının tenkidli metni (Erzurum, 1981).

6 Nuran (

Uzer) Altuner, ‘Saf

ı ve tezkiresi’, Ph.D. thesis, Istanbul University (1989), p. 140.

7 Sedit Y

uksel, S¸eyh Galip: eserlerinin dil ve sanat de

geri (Ankara, 1980), p. 20.

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hatice aynur

impossible to derive any pleasure or instruction from the conquests described

therein.

It would,however, be mistaken toassume that all authorsof the time covered

here agreed with Cevr

ı; on the contrary, in the early eighteenth century we

observe a renewed value being placed on spoken, everyday Turkish. Thus

‘Osm

anz

ade T

a’ib (d. 1724) took it upon himself to simplify the language

of Gelibolulu Mustaf

a‘

ı’s Mah

asin

u’l-

ab (1596); in this case, the sultan

himself had asked for such a recasting. In a kas

ıde introducing his work, T

a’ib

defended his method, explaining that he disliked the language of this book,

although he otherwise much admired the older writer. In T

a’ib’s view, ‘

with advancing years had become overly loquacious, favouring the repetition

of words and rhyming prose, both of which made the work unnecessarily

long. T

a’ib explained that he had abridged the text without changing the

sequence. Thus he had given it a new value, and with the repetitions gone,

‘

ı’s words of wisdom could be better appreciated. Now collected in ﬁve

sections, a comparison with the original showed that nothing had been lost,

and in fact the work had proﬁted from T

a’ib’s interventions. T

a’ib’s remarks

may be viewed as indicators of yet another change: for this author, who lived

in the reign of Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) and Dam

Ibr

ım Pas¸a (active 1718–30),

also known as the Tulip Age, referred to the Turkish spoken, read and written

in his own time. In this period, numerous works were translated into Ottoman

Turkish from Arabic and Persian, frequently with ofﬁcial support; probably

members of the elite who knew these languages still wanted to read their

favourites in Turkish.

Biographical dictionaries cum anthologies (tezkire) often stressed that a

given author was able to write poetry in Arabic and Persian; educated

Ottomans had encountered major literary works in these languages as young

students, and the texts studied then provided models for the literary works of

their mature years. ‘Osm

anz

ade T

a’ib, when appointed ‘poet laureate’, wrote

a kas

ıde in which he criticised those who dared to write poetry without having

studied the G

ulist

an of the Persian poet Sa’d

ı. While we still have no detailed

investigation of the literary texts learned in the medreses, some indications

can be gathered from Evliy

aC¸ elebi and Neb

ı Efendi-z

ade ‘Al

ı b. ‘Abdull

8 Ayan, Cevr

ı,p.14. It is interesting that Bitlisli’s work, not generally considered an especially

successful example of the copious sel

ımn

ame literature though containing some worth-

while historical information, was still being read in the seventeenth century. Indeed, in

1620,C¸ erkesler K

atibi Y

usuf produced a prose version of this work.

9 Salim Ayd

uz, ‘L

ale Devri’nde yapılan ilm

ı faaliyetler’, D

ıv

an:

Ilm

ıAras¸tırmalar 2, 3 (1997),

143–70.

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Ottoman literature

el-‘Us¸s¸

ı (d. 1785–6).

In the normal course of things, the Arabic and Persian

words learned during medrese training and imported into Ottoman Turkish,

whichincreased in number from the sixteenth century onwards,wereregarded

as an enhancement of the language. As we have noted, this was the view of

Mustaf

a‘

ı in the second half of the sixteenth century and, 400 years later,

Ziy

aPas¸a agreed with him. Yet the number of Arabic and Persian words used

in a literary text was linked to the education, profession and social milieu of

the author, as well as to the audience he wished to address.

This state of affairs is especially apparent from the works of N

ı(1642–

1712), one of the dominant ﬁgures in the Ottoman literary world of the second

half of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries. He has left ten

books, four in prose and the others in verse. The late eighteenth-century

poet S¸eyh G

alib has criticised the Persianised style of N

ı’s Hayr

ad, and

the English orientalist Edward Gibb has concurred with this evaluation. By

contrast, the writers Ziy

aPas¸a and Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, as well as the

historian Fuad K

opr

u, who have all concerned themselves with the origins of

the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary movements towards ‘simplicity

and localism’, have discerned the beginnings of this trend in N

ı’s poetry.

ah Sırrı Levend has even felt that one may reasonably doubt whether N

ı’s

poetry and his prose are really the work of one person.

Thus Tuhfet

u’l-

haremeyn, in which the writer discusses his pilgrimage to Mecca, contains

quite a few sentences that with some slight changes can be considered Persian

rather than Turkish.

After all, N

ı was for a certain period secretary to a

favoured courtier known as Mus

ahib Mustaf

aPas¸a, and thus was accustomed

to all the turns of style expected of an accomplished scribe. When writing a

continuation of the vita of the Prophet Muhammad by the well-known stylist

Ve y s

ı, N

ı also accommodated himself to the demands of both the genre

and his predecessor’s manner of writing. By contrast, in the mesnev

ı poems

urn

ame and Hayriyye, as well as in his collection of Turkish poems (d

ıv

an),

10 Evliy

aC¸ elebi, Evliy

aC¸ elebi Seyahatn

amesi: Topkapı Sarayı Ba

gdat 307 yazmasının transkrip-

siyonu – dizini, vol. I, ed. Orhan S¸aik G

okyay (Istanbul, 1996–2005), pp. 102–3;S¸

ukran

Fazlıo

glu, ‘Neb

ı Efendi-z

ade’nin Kas

ıde f

ı el-kutub el-mes¸h

ure ﬁ el-‘ul

um . . .’, Kutadgu

Bilig, Felsefe Bilim Aras¸tırmaları 3 (March 2003), 191–221,atp.212. At the very least the

following works were known: the rhymed dictionary of S¸

ahid

ı (d. 1550), known as Tuhfe-i

S¸

ahid

ı;H

afız el-S¸ir

ı (d. 1390), D

ıv

an;Fer

ıdud

ın el-‘Att

ar (d. 1230), Pendn

ame and Mantık

el-Tayr;Sa‘d

ı (d. 1292), G

ulisi

an and Bost

an.

11 Menderes Cos¸kun, Manzum ve mensur Osmanlı hac seyahatnameleri ve N

ı’nin Tuhfet

u’l-

harameyn’i (Ankara, 2002), pp. 85–6.

12 Meserret Diri

oz, Eserlerine g

ore N

ı (Istanbul, 1994), pp. 125–63;Ag

ah Sırrı Levend,

Nabi’nin surn

amesi: Vakaayi’-i hit

an-ı s¸ehzadeg

an-ı Hazret-i Sultan Muhammed-i Gaazi li-

Nabi Efendi (Istanbul, 1944), p. 17.

13 Cos¸kun, Manzum ve mensur Osmanlı,p.98.

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hatice aynur

ı has adopted a much simpler style, even declaring that ‘a collection of

gazels is not an Arabic dictionary’.

Evidently new approaches are needed if

we want to make sense of N

ı’s use of language.

As to the works known as melhame or melahim, they demonstrate once

again how the quality of language and style was nothing preordained; rather,

these features were determined by the readership the authors had envisaged.

In these folkloric texts, the position of the stars as well as certain climatic

and natural phenomena occurring in a given month or day are used in order

to predict the future. This genre is remarkable because it reﬂects the daily

concerns of ordinary people. Through melhames we catch a glimpse of how

these persons viewed their own material culture, and by the same token, it is

possible to access popular notions of geography and even of the cosmos as a

whole. Such texts are written in a Turkish close to the everyday language –

and in one instance even the spelling has been simpliﬁed in order to speed up

the process of writing.

In a different vein, a study of the language used in

scientiﬁc works before 1839 has also demonstrated that apart from the subjects

treated, the kind of readers that the authors of these books hoped to interest

determined the number of Arabic and Persian words that they would use in

their compositions.

In spite of the occasionally quite heavy borrowing of foreign words, in this

period the language of most written and oral literature, and also of ordinary

communication, was Turkish, more particularly the dialect spoken in Istanbul.

This had nothing to do with language-based nationalism; rather, people of

different ethnicities became Ottomans by adopting Istanbul Turkish, and to

be able to speak this language was seen as a privilege. In the Ris

ale-i Gar

ıbe,an

anonymous work probably written in the early eighteenth century, the author

scolded people who ‘have come to this great city, but have no idea why they

are here. These asses spend ﬁfty or sixty years [in Istanbul], yet they do not

succeed in improving their language and learning [proper] Turkish. When

what they mean is yaprak they will say barmak.’

These insults indicated how

important it was in daily life to speak standard Istanbul Turkish.

For many years,N

ı lived away from the capital, and in a poem he expressed

the importance of Istanbul speech in his life:

14 Ali Fuat Bilkan (ed.), N

ıD

ıv

anı, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1997), vol. I, p. 587.

15 Fikret Turan, ‘Halk Osmanlıcası I: Melhameler ve bir on yedinci y

uzyıl Melhamesi’, Bir:

urk D

unyası

Incelemeleri Dergisi, Prof. Dr Kemal Eraslan Sayısı 9–10 (1998), 685–709.

Ihsan Fazlıo

glu, ‘Osmanlı’da T

urkc¸e telif ve terc

ume eserlerin dil bilincinin

olus¸umundaki yeri’, Kutadgu Bilig, Felsefe Bilim Aras¸tırmaları 3 (March 2003), 151–84.

17 Hayati Develi (ed.), XVIII. y

uzyıl

Istanbul hayatına dair Ris

ale-i gar

ıbe (Istanbul, 2001),

pp. 22, 28 (my translation).

486

Ottoman literature

In the provinces the ear and the heart long for the sweet elocution of the

people of Istanbul. A good way of expressing oneself, or amorous glances and

elegance, pure faithfulness and every good thing are found to the highest and

ultimate degree in this incomparable city. Can such heart-warming meanings

and ﬁne elegant expressions come into being in the middle of Arabistan?

While living in Aleppo N

ı wrote in another poem that his words had lost

their ﬂavour because he was so far from Istanbul.

This sampling from different writers, which could easily be extended, shows

that a thorough re-evaluation is indeed in order. Such a study will need to

concern itself with differing attitudes towards Ottoman Turkish as a language,

the demands of genre and subject, and also the social milieus in which the

authors operated, as well as those inhabited by their readers.

Literary forms, genres and currents

As we have seen, Ottoman writers have produced works in verse and in prose,

and also pieces that are a mixture of the two. Yet when surveyingthe collections

of authors’ biographies that Ottoman literati also produced, there is no doubt

that the status of poetry was higher than that of the other two. When a writer

such as Evliy

aC¸ elebi enriched his prose text by the addition of poetry, either

composed by the author himself or else by others, the sections in verse might

serve a variety of ends. Some verses might be called poetic decorations, as

they served to make the text more profound and richer, but their removal

did not result in any loss of meaning. In other cases verse might be used like

proverbs – that is, to provide a brief, laconic summary of the major point. In a

third conﬁguration, verses might serve to express the feelings and thoughts of

the author in a more concentrated and impressive manner than was feasible

in prose.

Not much work has been done on the metres preferred in poetry; moreover,

we are not well informed about the genres favoured by Ottoman authors.

There are no detailed studies attempting to deﬁne individual genres, nor do

we yet have discussions of what authors wished to achieve when preferring

one of them to all others. Nor do we know how the different genres came to

be adopted, and then developed, changed around and ﬁnally turned into other

genres. We are just as little informed about the internal dynamics that might

emerge within a given genre, and can only guess how different genres related

to one another. Nor is there a consensus among the few scholars who have

18 Bilkan, N

ıD

ıv

anı, vol. I, pp. 119–20. 19 Ibid., vol. II, p. 981.

487