Köroğlu

Köroğlu (Kurroglou in older English spellings) is the legendary bandit-poet of Turkish and Turkic folklore. He robbed the caravans on the road between Persia and the Ottoman lands, and is remembered above all for the improvised songs he is said to have sung. He is the hero of a large cycle of tales and songs carried by wandering minstrels among the Turkic peoples of Anatolia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

The cycle is traditional, and its authorship is not known: no single author can be named, and the songs were passed on orally and changed with each telling. The English version used here is from Alexander Chodzko's Specimens of the Popular Poetry of Persia (1842), which places the hero in northern Khorasan in the second half of the seventeenth century. Chodzko's versions are set within his prose narrative, so the songs are given as paragraphs rather than as verse lines.