Köroğlu (The Adventures of Kurroglou)

Overview

Composed

An oral cycle that grew from the late sixteenth century onwards around a historical Anatolian rebel-poet; Chodzko's version was taken down in northern Persia in the 1830s and printed in 1842

Genre

Hikâye or destan: a minstrel's tale in which prose narration alternates with sung verse

Form

Prose story with the hero's songs (in Turkic, syllabic lines in stanzas sung to the saz); Chodzko renders both prose and songs in English prose

Language

Azerbaijani Turkish in Chodzko's source, with Persian narration; the cycle also exists in Anatolian Turkish, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Georgian and Armenian versions

Performers

The âşık (Chodzko's 'aushik'), a minstrel who sings to the long-necked lute called the saz; in Central Asia the bakhshi or bagshy

Setting

The mountain stronghold of Çamlıbel (Chodzko's Chamly-bill) on the borders of the Ottoman and Persian worlds, with raids to Erzurum, Kars, Tokat, Urfa and Istanbul

Hero

Köroğlu, 'son of the blind man', bandit chief, rider of the horse Kırat, and poet

Structure in this edition

Thirteen 'Meetings' (Persian majlis), each one evening's session of the reciter

Translation

Alexander Chodzko, in Specimens of the Popular Poetry of Persia (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1842)

Famous saying

'Tüfek icat oldu, mertlik bozuldu' ('the musket was invented, and valour was spoiled'), the Anatolian Köroğlu's verdict on the age of firearms; it does not occur in Chodzko's version

Context

Köroğlu (pronounced roughly 'Kur-oh-loo', and spelled 'Kurroglou' by Chodzko) means 'son of the blind man'. He is the most widely travelled hero of Turkic oral literature: his story is told, in very different shapes, from the Balkans and Anatolia through Azerbaijan and northern Iran to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, and it was borrowed by Georgian and Armenian storytellers as well. In the Anatolian Turkish tradition he is a highwayman of the mountains of Bolu; in Central Asia (as Görogly or Gurughli) he becomes a semi-mythical ruler and father of heroes. Everywhere he is both a fighter and a singer, and the songs credited to him are among the best-known folk poems in Turkish.

Behind the legend stands a historical figure. Ottoman state registers (mühimme defterleri) of the later sixteenth century, as Boratav and later scholars have reported, mention a rebel called Köroğlu in the region of Bolu, in the years when disorder in Anatolia was growing into the Celali revolts, a long series of uprisings by unemployed soldiers, students of religion and disaffected peasants (Boratav 1931) (Barkey 1994). A poet named Köroğlu, whose verses survive in minstrel manuscripts, belongs to the same period, and some scholars think the bandit and the poet may have been one man, though the identification is not certain. Pertev Naili Boratav's Köroğlu Destanı (1931) first set the documents beside the legend and remains the foundation of Turkish scholarship on the cycle (Boratav 1931).

The cycle belongs to the tradition of the âşık, the 'lover' or minstrel, heir of the older Turkic ozan. The âşık accompanies himself on the saz, a long-necked lute, and performs in coffeehouses, at weddings and at village gatherings, often over several nights (Köprülü 1966) (Boratav 1946) (Başgöz 2008). His usual form is the hikâye or 'tale', which Turkish scholars also call destan when the subject is heroic: the story is told in prose, and at every moment of strong feeling (a challenge, a lament, a declaration of love) the narrator takes up the saz and sings the hero's own words in verse. Köroğlu's songs, in the bold koçaklama ('heroic song') style, are thus not ornaments but the hinges of the plot (Boratav 1946) (Moyle 1990).

Alexander Chodzko (Aleksander Borejko Chodźko, 1804–1891), a Polish poet in the Russian diplomatic service in Persia, heard the story in the 1830s from professional reciters in the Caspian provinces of northern Persia, who told it in Persian prose and sang the songs in Azerbaijani Turkish. He published an English version in 1842 in a volume printed by the Oriental Translation Fund (Chodzko 1842). It was the first large Turkic heroic cycle to reach a Western readership, earlier than Radloff's Kyrgyz Manas or the Central Asian epics collected by Russian scholars later in the century; George Sand adapted it in French within a year (Chadwick 1969) (Reichl 1992).

This guide uses Chodzko's text, which the site divides as he did into thirteen 'Meetings' (majlis, the evening sessions of the reciter). Readers should remember that his version is Persianised: the hero is a Turkmen who becomes a Shi'ite at Mashhad, the blinding is done by a prince of Turkestan rather than by the Bey of Bolu, and the ending is a murder rather than the Anatolian hero's withdrawal from a world of guns (Wilks 2001). In the guide's own prose the modern Turkish forms are used: Köroğlu (Kurroglou), Kırat (Kyrat), Çamlıbel (Chamly-bill), Ayvaz, Nigâr Hanım (Nighara); quotations keep Chodzko's spellings. The site also holds twenty-five of the songs as separate poems.

Plot overview

Roushan, son of Mirza-Serraf, master of the stud to Sultan Murad of Turkestan, sees his father blinded with a hot iron for presenting two ugly colts sired by a stallion that came out of the Oxus. The blind father, an astrologer, trains one colt in secret and makes it a wonder-horse, Kırat; he teaches his son to ride and fight, and Roushan defies the prince in a string of improvised songs, taking the name Köroğlu, 'son of the blind man'. After his father's death at Mashhad Köroğlu defeats and enlists the brigand Daly Hassan, gathers seven hundred and seventy-seven horsemen and settles at Çamlıbel on the frontier between Persia and Turkey (Meetings I–II).

The middle Meetings are a series of adventures. Köroğlu carries off the beautiful butcher's son Ayvaz from Urfa and adopts him; he takes the blacksmith's son Demurchy-Oglou into his band; he slips into Istanbul disguised as a minstrel and elopes with Nigâr, daughter of the Ottoman sultan, defeating her brother on the road. A scullion steals Kırat and Köroğlu wins him back in disguise. A stranger beats him in single combat and he kills him in shame; he woos Parizadda of Kars and is rescued by Ayvaz; he frees Ayvaz and his companions from the pasha of Tokat (Meetings III–IX).

Later Meetings turn darker. Ayvaz, chafing at his role as cupbearer, deserts and betrays Köroğlu to his enemy Bolly-beg, and is forgiven; Demurchy-Oglou rebels and is forgiven; Köroğlu, ageing, is captured, dragged to Istanbul and thrown into a pit at Üsküdar (Scutari), from which he is freed by the pasha's daughter and the young Issa-Bally riding Kırat (Meetings X–XII).

In the last Meeting the grey-bearded hero names Ayvaz his heir, has his sword nailed into its scabbard and sets out alone on Kırat for Isfahan and Mecca. Two disgraced courtiers of Shah Abbas II receive him as a guest, hamstring Kırat by night and behead the unresisting hero. A drop of his blood on the shah's robe reveals the crime; the band takes vengeance, and Köroğlu is buried in a tomb (Meeting XIII).

Meeting by meeting

Characters

Köroğlu and his band

Köroğlu (Kurroglou)

Born Roushan (Turkish Ruşen or Ruşen Ali), son of a blinded master of horse. He becomes the chief of a band of seven hundred and seventy-seven at Çamlıbel, a robber who calls himself the angel of death and a minstrel whose improvised songs answer every crisis. He is generous, boastful, proud, cunning, capable of cruelty and of remorse; he ages in the course of the cycle and dies, in Chodzko, by treachery on the road to Mecca.

Kırat (Kyrat)

The grey ('kır') horse sired by a stallion from the Oxus and trained in darkness by the blind father. Once winged, Kırat is still faster than any horse alive; it wakes its sleeping master, kills grooms who covet it and leaps ravines. Its theft (Meeting VI) and its maiming (Meeting XIII) are the hero's two great griefs.

Mirza-Serraf

Köroğlu's father, master of the stud to Sultan Murad, blinded for presenting the ugly colts. An astrologer and horseman, he trains son and horse and lays down the rule that his son must never rebel against the Shah. In Anatolian versions he is Koca Yusuf, the groom of Bolu Bey.

Ayvaz

The butcher's son of Urfa, carried off for his beauty and adopted as son, cupbearer and eventually heir. He proves himself against Reyhan-Arab at Kars, but resents serving at table, deserts and betrays his father (Meeting X), and is forgiven; at the end he governs Çamlıbel.

Daly Hassan, Daly-Mehter and Daly-Ahmed

Chodzko's names for the 'mad' (Turkish deli) companions fluctuate. Daly Hassan is the brigand defeated and enrolled in Meeting II; Daly-Mehter is the equerry and Köroğlu's most loyal fighter, who rescues him in Meeting X; Daly-Ahmed is the reckless comrade of the Tokat adventure.

Demurchy-Oglou and Kimchy-Oglou

Demurchy-Oglou (Demircioğlu), the blacksmith's son from Nakhchivan, wins his place by standing still under Köroğlu's arrows; in Meeting XI he deserts after a quarrel with Ayvaz and is forgiven. Kimchy-Oglou is another senior member of the band.

Issa-Bally and Khoja Yakub

Issa-Bally, the Egyptian pasha's son stolen as a child, rides Kırat to rescue Köroğlu from the pit at Scutari and marries Dunah Pasha. Khoja Yakub, the merchant adopted as brother, discovers Ayvaz and later carries his song-letter from Tokat.

Rulers and enemies

Sultan Murad of Turkestan

In Chodzko the prince who blinds Mirza-Serraf; his role corresponds to that of Bolu Bey in the Anatolian tradition.

Bolu Bey

The governor of Bolu in the Anatolian versions, who blinds his groom Yusuf for bringing him an ugly colt and becomes Köroğlu's lifelong enemy. He does not appear under this name in Chodzko, though the Turkish commander Bolly-beg of Meetings IX–X may be a faint echo of him.

Pashas, khans and Shah Abbas II

Köroğlu's opponents include Hussein-Aly-Khan of Erivan, Burji Sultan (Nigâr's brother), Reyhan the Arab, several pashas named Hassan, Bolly-beg, Buly Pasha, and finally Almas Khan and Behram Khan, the courtiers who murder him. Shah Abbas II, whom the hero never fights, puts a price on his head but avenges his death.

Women

Nigâr Hanım (Nighara)

The Ottoman sultan's daughter who falls in love with Köroğlu by report, plans her own abduction and becomes his chief wife. She restrains his raids and forgives his later marriages.

Parizadda and Dunah Pasha

Parizadda, daughter of the pasha of Kars, is won by the disguised hero in Meeting VIII. Dunah Pasha, the vizier's daughter, comforts Köroğlu in the pit at Scutari and marries Issa-Bally.

Others

Hamza

The bald scullion who outwits both Daly-Mehter and Köroğlu and steals Kırat, and is later made ruler of the nomads; the cycle honours his cunning.

Mustapha-beg

A Kurdish chief, sometimes ally and once would-be assassin, who is won over by Köroğlu's song of praise.

The stranger of Meeting VII

The courteous rider who defeats and spares Köroğlu, and whom Köroğlu later kills in a mountain pass, discovering that he was an Armenian.

Themes

Justice, banditry and the outlaw-hero

Köroğlu begins as the avenger of an injustice: a ruler has blinded a faithful servant. His band lives by plunder, but the cycle presents this as the honest economy of men who 'neither plough nor trade', and it repeatedly contrasts the generosity of the bandit chief with the greed and blindness of princes. In this he resembles Robin Hood and the other noble robbers whom Eric Hobsbawm called 'social bandits', men regarded by ordinary people as champions and avengers (Hobsbawm 1969).

Yet Chodzko's version also shows the cost of his justice: merchants mutilated, an innocent stranger beheaded, the grudges listed by the pasha's vizier. The cycle celebrates the outlaw without making him a saint, and it is careful, in this Persian version, to keep him loyal to the Shah (Wilks 2001).

The poet-hero

Köroğlu is a warrior who sings. Every challenge, lament, plea and boast is an improvisation, and the narrator stops the story so that he can perform it. He says himself that without his songs no one would know his deeds. The songs disarm enemies, win women, recall forgotten friendships and even turn an assassin into an ally.

This makes the cycle a mirror of its own performance. The âşık who tells the story is also singing the hero's songs, often in disguise as an âşık within the story; the boundary between performer and hero is deliberately thin (Başgöz 2008) (Reichl 2000).

Horse and hero

Kırat is the hero's other self, created by the father's art and destroyed by treachery at the end. The horse's theft and recovery, its intelligence and loyalty, and its maiming are central events, and some of the finest songs are addressed to it. The Turkic epic tradition generally gives the hero's horse an unusual dignity, and the Köroğlu cycle is its most famous example (Reichl 1992) (Chadwick 1969).

Fathers and sons

The cycle opens with a son avenging his father and ends with a father naming his adopted son heir. Between the two, Köroğlu's love for Ayvaz, his teaching of him in battle and his anguish at Ayvaz's betrayal give the story an emotional depth that the adventures alone would lack.

Fortune and old age

The later Meetings are full of complaints against Fortune and Fate. The hero who taxed kingdoms finds himself chained, starved and mocked, and the grey beard shown him by the barber turns him from war to pilgrimage. The last songs are farewells, and the ending is less a defeat than a submission to time.

Motifs

Disguise as a minstrel

Again and again Köroğlu (and later Issa-Bally) enters an enemy court or camp as an âşık, sings, and reveals himself through the song. The disguise turns performance into action.

Bread and salt

Shared food binds guest and host. Köroğlu will not betray a man whose bread he has eaten, and alliances throughout the cycle are made and kept by this rule.

Love from a portrait or by report

Ayvaz, Nigâr and Parizadda are all loved before they are seen, through a picture or a traveller's tale, a motif shared with Turkish and Persian romances.

The prisoner's songs

Chained or in a pit, the hero sings of fortune and pride; captivity becomes an occasion for his most reflective verse.

Symbols

Çamlıbel

The 'pine-covered pass' is the outlaw's fortress and court, a counter-kingdom on the frontier of two empires. Köroğlu prefers it 'above all the gardens of the world', and his farewell to its mountains is the farewell to his life.

Blindness

The blinded father sees what the sighted prince misses, and the hero's very name preserves the injustice that made him.

The sword nailed in its scabbard

Köroğlu's final renunciation of violence: he wears the sword but can no longer draw it.

The saz

The minstrel's lute, which the hero orders made in Istanbul, is as much his weapon as the sword: through it he reveals himself, wins, pleads and mourns.

Critical debates

One hero or many?

Ottoman registers of the later sixteenth century name a rebel Köroğlu in the Bolu region of northern Anatolia, and a poet Köroğlu is credited with verses in the âşık style of the same age. Boratav argued that the historical bandit-poet gave his name and some of his songs to a legend that then absorbed older material (Boratav 1931). Others distinguish the poet from the outlaw, or think that several men bore the name.

The Central Asian Görogly, a king and ancestor of heroes with a supernatural birth from a dead mother in a grave, seems far removed from any sixteenth-century rebel; the question is whether a historical core travelled east or whether the name attached itself to an existing heroic type (Chadwick 1969) (Reichl 1992).

Origin and diffusion

Where did the cycle begin? Turkish scholars, following Boratav, usually place its origin in the Celali-era Anatolia of Bolu and Çamlıbel and see the Azerbaijani and Central Asian forms as later developments. Azerbaijani scholarship emphasises the cycle's flowering among the âşıqs of Azerbaijan and northern Iran, and Soviet Turkmen and Uzbek scholars claimed great antiquity for their own versions.

Comparative studies show both diffusion and local remaking: the Anatolian version is a frontier bandit story, the Azerbaijani-Persian one adds Shi'ite piety and loyalty to the shah, and the Central Asian cycles turn it into a dynastic epic with many 'branches' (Reichl 1992) (Chadwick 1969) (Wilks 2001) (Eberhard 1953).

How reliable is Chodzko?

Chodzko's version was the first that Western readers knew, and it is still the only complete English one. But his reciters narrated in Persian, and he translated the Turkish songs into English prose, losing their metre, rhyme and refrains. His notes, footnotes and occasional embellishments also colour the text.

Judith Wilks has shown how his version 'Persianises' the hero, making him a Shi'ite convert loyal to Shah Abbas, and how this changes the meaning of the banditry (Wilks 2001). Readers should therefore treat Chodzko as a valuable record of one regional tradition in the 1830s rather than as 'the' Köroğlu (Chodzko 1842) (Boratav 1931).

The âşık, performance and the hikâye

Köprülü traced the âşık to the ancient ozan and the Turkic minstrel-shaman, and later scholars described the hikâye as a living performance genre in which the narrator improvises the prose and sings memorised or improvised songs (Köprülü 1966) (Boratav 1946).

İlhan Başgöz's fieldwork on performance and Natalie Moyle's study of the minstrel tale emphasise the role of audience, pace and the minstrel's own interventions; Wolfram Eberhard recorded tales in the coffeehouses of southeastern Turkey (Başgöz 2008) (Moyle 1990) (Eberhard 1955). Read in this light, Chodzko's 'Meetings' are the written trace of evenings of performance. Reichl's comparative work sets such Turkic performance traditions beside medieval European oral poetry (Reichl 2000) (Reichl 2012).

The outlaw and the state

Hobsbawm's concept of the 'social bandit', the peasant outlaw whom his community sees as a hero and avenger, has often been applied to Köroğlu (Hobsbawm 1969) (Hobsbawm 1959). The Celali background seems to fit: the bandits of late sixteenth-century Anatolia were products of a social crisis.

But historians such as Karen Barkey argue that Ottoman bandits were often would-be insiders, demobilised soldiers who wanted posts and were bargained with and co-opted by the state, rather than peasant rebels (Barkey 1994). Köroğlu's dealings with pashas and his refusal to fight the shah can support either reading.

Köroğlu in the Republic and in Soviet Azerbaijan

In the Turkish Republic Köroğlu became a national folk hero: Boratav's study, the folklore collections of the 1930s onwards and editions taken down from living minstrels such as Behçet Mahir of Erzurum made the cycle a school classic, and novelists retold it, as Yaşar Kemal did in Üç Anadolu Efsanesi (1967) (Boratav 1931) (Kaplan 1973) (Kaftancıoğlu 1974) (Kemal 1967).

In Soviet Azerbaijan Üzeyir Hacıbəyov's opera Koroğlu (1937) cast the hero as a leader of the people against khans and oppressors, a reading that suited Soviet ideology; in Turkmenistan the Görogly epic became a symbol of national culture and was added to UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in 2015 (Reichl 1992).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why is the hero called 'son of the blind man'? How does the blinding shape his career?

   Think about injustice and revenge, about the blind father's insight, and about how Chodzko's Sultan Murad differs from the Anatolian Bolu Bey.

2. What is the function of Köroğlu's songs in the narrative?

   Look at the moments when the story stops for an improvisation: challenges, laments, pleas, love. Consider the claim in Meeting IV that without the songs nobody would know his deeds.

3. Is Köroğlu a social bandit in Hobsbawm's sense?

   Weigh his generosity and his hostility to tyrants against the robbery of merchants, the killing of the stranger and the vizier's list of grievances. Consider Barkey's view of Ottoman bandits.

4. How does the relationship between Köroğlu and Ayvaz develop?

   Trace the abduction (III), the battle at Kars (VIII), the Tokat adventure (IX), the desertion (X) and the inheritance (XIII).

5. What role does Kırat play in the cycle?

   Consider its supernatural origin, its theft and recovery, its intelligence and the meaning of its maiming at the end.

6. How does the minstrel's disguise reflect the tale's own mode of performance?

   Look at the episodes in Istanbul, at the Haniss camp, in Tokat and at Buly Pasha's camp; think about the âşık telling a story about an âşık.

7. In what ways is Chodzko's version 'Persianised'?

   Note the conversion at Mashhad, the father's command not to rebel against the Shah, and the ending under Shah Abbas II. Compare the Anatolian ending with the musket.

8. How are women portrayed in the cycle?

   Compare Nigâr, Parizadda and Dunah Pasha. Who takes the initiative? Look also at Köroğlu's refusal to be rescued by a woman.

9. Compare the Anatolian ending ('tüfek icat oldu, mertlik bozuldu') with Chodzko's ending. What does each say about heroism?

   One blames a technological change for the end of valour; the other a personal betrayal and the passing of time.

10. How has Köroğlu been used in modern national cultures?

    Consider the Turkish Republic's folklore studies and school texts, Hacıbeyov's opera in Soviet Azerbaijan and the Turkmen UNESCO listing.

Further reading

• Barkey, Karen. Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
• Başgöz, İlhan. Hikâye: Turkish Folk Romance as Performance Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
• Boratav, Pertev Naili. Köroğlu Destanı. İstanbul: Evkaf Matbaası, 1931.
• Boratav, Pertev Naili. Halk Hikâyeleri ve Halk Hikâyeciliği. Ankara: Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1946.
• Chadwick, Nora K., and Victor Zhirmunsky. Oral Epics of Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
• Chodzko, Alexander. Specimens of the Popular Poetry of Persia, as Found in the Adventures and Improvisations of Kurroglou, the Bandit-Minstrel of Northern Persia, and in the Songs of the People Inhabiting the Shores of the Caspian Sea. London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1842.
• Eberhard, Wolfram. Minstrel Tales from Southeastern Turkey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955.
• Eberhard, Wolfram, and Pertev Naili Boratav. Typen türkischer Volksmärchen. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1953.
• Hobsbawm, E. J. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959.
• Hobsbawm, E. J. Bandits. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969.
• Kaftancıoğlu, Ümit. Köroğlu Kolları: Halk Destanları. İstanbul: Büyük Dağıtım Yayınevi, 1974.
• Kaplan, Mehmet, Mehmet Akalın and Muhan Bali, eds. Köroğlu Destanı. Anlatan Behçet Mahir. Ankara: Sevinç Matbaası, 1973.
• Kemal, Yaşar. Üç Anadolu Efsanesi. İstanbul: Ararat Yayınevi, 1967.
• Köprülü, Mehmet Fuad. Edebiyat Araştırmaları. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1966. (Includes his essay on the origin and development of the âşık tradition.)
• Moyle, Natalie Kononenko. The Turkish Minstrel Tale Tradition. New York: Garland, 1990.
• Reichl, Karl. Turkic Oral Epic Poetry: Traditions, Forms, Poetic Structure. New York: Garland, 1992.
• Reichl, Karl. Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Heroic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
• Reichl, Karl, ed. Medieval Oral Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012.
• Wilks, Judith M. 'The Persianization of Köroğlu: Banditry and Royalty in Three Versions of the Köroğlu Destan.' Asian Folklore Studies 60, no. 2 (2001): 305–318.