The Legends & Poetry of The Turks

This is a classic collection of stories retold by generations of elders about life from the Ottoman Turks perspective. Its colorful illustrations give a glimpse into the world we rarely have seen outside of the Turkish territory. The wise words of wisdom is an invaluable tool in teaching others the meaning of life as seen through the eyes of a person hundreds of years ago. (c) Z. Bey All Rights Reserved. The Ottoman Turks, that is, the Turks who founded the present Turkish Empire, were a Tartar or Turanian tribe from Central Asia who adopted the Mohammedan faith and began their conquest of the Mohammedan world about the year 1300. They then possessed legends or childish tales of their own which still survive; and these are still told among the mass of the people with simple faith. One or two of these are given here, to show the natural human character of the race. The Turks next turned, in literature, to poetry. Persian Mohammedan poetry was then at its best; and the Turks imitated, but scarcely improved upon, its forms. So great, indeed, became the Turkish admiration for poetry that almost every Turkish Sultan, from the year fourteen hundred down to the present, has written poetry. Turkish poetry has chiefly followed the Arabic fashion of expending itself upon language rather than upon thought. We are told that when the first Turkish epic poet Ahmedi presented to Sultan Bajazet's son his long epic history of Alexander the Great, the prince rebuked the poet's years of labor, saying that one tiny, perfectly polished poem would have been worth more than all the epics. Hence it is chiefly to the polishing of tiny poems that the poetic genius of the Turks has been applied. They have a favorite form called the "gazel," which might be likened to our English sonnet, except that the gazel is by far more intricate. It is, in fact, compared by the Turks to a flower with its petals constantly overlapping, forming a circle, and ending at the point where they began. In rhyme, for instance, the gazel opens with a rhyming couplet, and then through the whole poem the second line of each couplet repeats this opening rhyme.