Throughout history, and around the entire world, people have preserved and transmitted their shared wisdom in the form of tales, anecdotes, proverbs, jokes, and symbolically laden ritual practices. These cultural devices are highly condensed formulae for interpreting and evaluating people and events, and for justifying expected modes of behavior. In the terms of Emile Durkheim, the famous turn-of-the-century French social scientist, the contents of these devices constitute some of the most important "collective representations" of a people. They manifest a shared consciousness.
Historically, a people's oral literature and ritual practices have illustrated, in symbolic form, their solutions to universal ethical and practical problems. In the past especially, when most of the world's population was illiterate, oral folklore and ritual were the efficient means by which new generations learned the kernels of wisdom arrived at by their ancestors.
During the early 1970s, I collected samples of this folk tradition from Turkish peasants and townspeople in the district and town of Susurluk, located in the Balikesir province of northwestern Anatolia. This area has a cultural tradition that evolved out of a rich history of diverse peoples and civilizations.
Present-day Balikesir and Susurluk are located in the ancient land of Mysia, named after a people that the Greek geographer Strabo said dressed in deerskins and spoke a mixture of Lydian and Phrygian. After the Mysians (1,500-1,200 B.C.), the Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, Persians, Hellenes, Romans, and Byzantines all enjoyed successive periods of rule over the region. In the twelfth century A.D., the armies of the Second Crusade under Louis VII, and the Third Crusade under Friedrich I, crossed Mysia. The Latin state established after the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) included the northwestern portion of Mysia in its domain.
Turkic peoples entered Asia Minor in large numbers after the defeat of the Byzantine army in 1071 at Manzikert in Eastern Anatolia. By the middle of the twelfth century, numerous ghazi emirates had been established across Asia Minor. Each was ruled by a Turkish dynasty and contained a party of ghazis, "warriors of the faith," who earned their status by fighting against non-Muslims. These Muslim emirates also fought with each other.
In 1155 the Seljuk emirate attained supremacy over the others, only to be devastated by invading Mongols in 1243. In about 1300, Kara Isa (Dark Isa), the head of a ghazi contingent, founded his Karasi emirate in the ancient land of Mysia. He established his capital, Balikesir, on the site of ancient Hadrianoutherai, one of the many products of the Roman Emperor Hadrian's mania for building. The settlement was situated astride the great Roman and Byzantine land routes to Miletopolis (today's Karacabey) and Constantinople.
The emirate became a magnet for many peoples seeking either a refuge from the Mongols or an opportunity to fight the Byzantines for booty and glory. The emirate boasted quick-striding equestrian forces and a navy, made up of both Greeks and Turks, that plundered Byzantine towns along the Dardanelles. Eventually, the Karasi forces allied with those of the neighboring Ottoman emirate to conquer Byzantium and expand into the
...
Read Full Article
|
