Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre is the first recorded native poet of the Western Turks: a mystic who wrote in Anatolian Turkish rather than in the Persian forms that Ottoman court poets later preferred. Ottoman biographers describe him as nearly unlettered, a disciple of the holy man Tapduk Emre, whose verse was held to be a direct gift of God.

Only a little is known of his life, and the early sources disagree. E. J. W. Gibb, whose History of Ottoman Poetry (1900) gives the first English account of him, notes that one of his own poems dates his devotion to the Path to the year 707 AH (1307–8), which places him about a century before the dates given by later biographers.