|
Turkish-Armenian Exchanges in Language
The well-known Turkologist Andreas Tietze said: "The Turkish they spoke seemed to them to be more convenient for this purpose and easier," when discussing the use of Turkish in the daily life of Armenians living in Istanbul in his foreword to Vartan Paşa´s work entitled Akabi Hikâyesi that he acknowledges as the "first Turkish novel". He also pointed out the difficulties of using Arabic letters, of texts written in an ancient language being read to them in their schools and the problem of expressing the life of their own times in that language. Tietze added, in his foreword, the following: "If [Vartan Paşa] had written in the archaic Armenian used in church books of that period, no one would have been able to read it comfortably and he himself would not have been satisfied. Given such a situation, he decided to write his book in Turkish. Because his community members who read little found Arabic letters difficult and because the Armenians in Anatolia wrote in Turkish, he used the Armenian alphabet that had been in continual use for a long time; he committed his work to paper and completed it in a form that suited Turkish. In this way, he produced a book that could be read easily and comfortably by Ottoman Armenians". At the same time, it ought not be forgotten that a book of religious instruction was written in Kipçak Turkish but with Armenian letters. The person who penned this work notes that he had translated it from Latin into "his own different language". Edmond Schütz also published a prayer book. The work was written in 1618 in Lvov and was in Kipçak Turkish but with Armenian letters. One sees quite a number of religious, literary and historical works of the same type. According to Omeljan Pritsak, the total accumulation of works that have been described as Kipçak-Armenian occur in the middle of the 11th century at the end of the Seljuk assaults. When the Armenian Bagratid state in north-east Anatolia was destroyed, the Armenians migrated in big groups and settled in the Crimea. They gave the area such names as Greater Armenia (Armenia Magna) and Maritime Armenia (Armenia Maritima) in the 13th and 14th centuries. The main cities were Kefe (modern Feodosia), Solhat and Sudak, the last-mentioned a very important commercial center. They were frequently and continually involved in relations with the Kipçak Turks and as a result they appropriated Kipçak Turkish as their administrative and church language; however, they were able to maintain their religion, alphabet and Armenian expressions to a great extent. Some of these migrated again in 1280 on the invitation of Leo I, the king of Galatia and Lodomerya in western Ukraine, and later Poland took them in. Ever since 1496 the main center has been the city of Kamenez-Podolsk. Edmond Schütz stands on the hypothesis concerning the Armenians settling in the Crimea. Küçük Ioannesow, an educator from Moscow´s Lazarev Institute, discovered 150 Armenian gravestones in the Crimea between 1895 and 1896, and he dated the earliest two of these as 1027 and 1047. Schütz notes that it is necessary to make these dates 1357 and 1557 because of mistakes in the way they were read. According to documents, the Armenians settled in the Crimea between 1280 and 1290. In this too, the commercial interests of the Genoese and the Armenian traders were factors. Armenian businessmen established close commercial ties with Iran and the east via Trabzon and in the south through Egypt. When Fatih Sultan Mehmed conquered the Crimea (1475), it is noted that he sent 40,000 people to Istanbul and of these most were Armenians. One part of the Armenians also moved to Poland and Moldavia. Despite this movement, Chardin, a well-known French traveller of the 17th century, mentions that in 1673 there were 800 Christian families in the Crimea of which a portion were of Greek origin and the rest Armenian. The Armenians were traders, artisans and gardeners. In the years following the Küçük Kaynarca Agreement of 1774 and after the Russians established their control over the Crimea, the Greek people there were forced to migrate to Ekaterinoslav by the Tsarist regime, and the Armenians went to eight villages in Nor Nahchevan and its vicinity near Rostov on the shore of the Don River. This group which was known as the Kipçak Armenians -if they were not members of the Turkish-based Gregorian churchremained under the very deep influence of Turkish culture, and, as Omeljan Pritsak points out, they became a community which kept its religion, alphabet and some Armenian expressions but forgot its mother tongue. Those who migrated to Poland and settled there were catholicized. Edmond Schütz in a different article notes that nearly 40 of the 100 Armenian magazines being published in Istanbul ever since 1840 used Armenian letters with a Turkish text, on the basis of a book which G. Stepanian published in 1963 in Yerevan (Erivan). Among these were the novels of Xavier de Montepin and Alexander Dumas. In the work by Simeon the same writer registers more than 800 words taken from Turkish. There is likewise evidence for 806 basic words in Turkish that have been taken from Armenian. One of the main sources for Robert Dankoff who carried out this research is the Türkiye´de Halk Ağzindan Söz Derleme Dergisi.
The Influence of Turkish Literature on Armenian Literature
In an article H[ayk] Berberian (Bérbérian) suggests that the Armenians who lived for many centuries in Anatolia with the Turks and spoke Turkish should be recognized as "turcophone" while those who resided with other peoples in the same way abandoned their own language and spoke that of the others, were a sociological phenomenon. The Armenians who speak Turkish have a literature. This can be separated into the following five categories. 1. The works of the minstrels. There are works composed by more than 400 Armenian saz-poets from the 17th century up to the 1840s. The majority of these works that were played and sung to the accompaniment of the saz were in Armenian and Turkish while a portion of them were in Turkish only. Berberian divides the Armenian saz-poets into three groups - the Iranian, Turkish and Georgian Schools and cites as examples Köroğlu, Aşik Garip, Kerem and Asli, fiah ismail and Gülizar, Melikşah and Güllü Hanim, and Hurşid and Mihri. In order to be able to better know some of the minstrels of Armenian origin whose names can only be given by relying on researchers such as Fuad Köprülü, Ahmet Rasim and ihsan Hincer and some Armenian writers, it is necessary to be able to specify what kind of influence Turkish minstrel literature had on the Armenians. Mesihi was an Armenian who lived in Diyarbakir in the 16th century. According to Aşik Çelebi, this individual who wrote the talik script well and poeticized in Persian travelled as a merchant to Istanbul, Edirne and finally, to Venice.
Mirzacan, Raci Damaci notes, was born in the Karabağ village of Çanakçi, lived at the beginning of the 19th century and knew Russian, Turkish and Persian well in addition to his native language of Armenian. Fuat Köprülü writes that this individual knew the legends that belonged to the history of mysticism. Mirzacan praised Turkishness and the Turks in every meeting and as a result ended up in prison because of the slanders of his coreligioners and people. Damaci passes on a poem that he wrote in prison: There´s no one to share grief, no friend for those in woe; All acquaintances have turned into strangers now. Fate you shut me up in a dungeon in the end And never freed my soul from distress and sorrow. Sarkis Zeki was born in 1842 in Sungurlu, completed his elementary education in the Armenian school and later continued on to a medrese. He held a number of different official positions and died in 1891. Fuat Köprülü writes that he believed this person was also a sincere Bektaşi-Hurufi dervish. When Ahmet Rasim discusses the minstrels he says that Armenians were to be found among them and gives quite a few names: Derviş Hampar, Meydani, Lenkiya, Bidadi, Harabat Haçik, Aşik fiirini, Mihri and Puryani whom he characterizes as the last minstrels of the 19th century. Sevda´i, Saliki, Sabriya, Enveri, Nutkiya, Resmi, Ahteri and Namiya are also among those who were famous for playing and singing. Fikret Türkmen provides information based on the works of Azeri researchers on Turkish folk tales published among the Armenians. In one article also he refers to Armenian Minstrel Literature. The Armenian Aşug Emir who died in 1882 has the very meaningful quatrain below: Our faiths are apart, we are strong brothers: For our destiny, we share each other´s. United we´re a mountain, one arm, one hand; We´re feeble slaves if divided we stand. Aşug Emir talks about Turkish and Armenian brotherhood in these lines as if they were deeply involved in friendly relations, in
helping each other and, if separated, easily damaged. How beautifully these lines express that both became great and well off as peoples belonging to two different religions but supporting each other. Fuat Köprülü praises a work of Arşak Çobanian´s entitled Les Trouvères arméniens (1906) on "Armenian Aşug (Aşik) Literature". The writer in this book points out the deep and powerful influences that Turkish literature had on Armenian literature. In the Middle Ages in France those who addressed the aristocratic class were known as troubadours. They sang lyric poetry to the accompaniment of a lute. In the East too, the sazpoets recited poetry to the sound of the lute or saz at fairs, weddings, convents, coffeehouses and military parades. Fuat Köprülü relates that those who provided information about Çobanian and from him on the Armenian Aşuglar say that those who were blind from birth performed their art at weddings, banquets, holidays or death ceremonies. 2. Literary Works. Of these Berberian discusses Hohannes who was born in the Diyarbakir village of Tel-Göran (today attached to the Derik district of Mardin) and lived between the 14th and 15th centuries, and in later periods the Armenian poets who wrote Turkish poems in the Crimea and Istanbul. For example, the poem of Pagdasar Dpir (1683-1768) below is attractive in its own way: My best wishes for long life to those who love me, For now my friends might as well forget about me. May their faces always beam with light, happily; For a while, my friends might just as well forget me.
There are literary and historical texts such as Vartan Pasha´s Akabi Hikâyesi discussed above among the works with Turkish texts in Armenian letters and published by A. Tietze (Eren Kitabevi) and Tanburi Arutin´s Tahmaskulu Hanin Tevarihi. Kevork Pamukciyan has published articles on books with Turkish texts in the Armenian alphabet in journals such Tarih ve Edebiyat, Hayat Tarih Mecmuasi, Türk Folkloru, Belleten, Müteferrika, Folklor ve Etnografya Araştirmalari and Tarih ve Toplum. 3. Translations made by Armenians. These are Turkish texts written or printed in the Armenian alphabet. Among these works are Aesop´s Fables, Cervantes´ Don Quixote and Daniel Defoe´s Robinson Crusoe. Friedrich Kraelitz-Greifenhorst, Enno Littmann, Otto Spies and Eugeniusz Sluszkiewicz concentrated on literary works and publications of this same type. In Jean Deny and Edward Tryjarski´s small article entitled "La literature armenokiptchak" the topic of discussion is the written products of the community that lived in Poland and Ukraine. They were called Kipçak-Armenians and produced works in Turkish with Armenian letters. Fikret Türkmen, also, in some of his works aside from those discussed above, talks about Turkish-Armenian cultural relations and especially the influences in the people´s and minstrels´ literature of these two peoples who lived together or as neighbours for many centuries, and he noted that the first ones shaped what happened to the later ones. Since most of the Armenian minstrels, with a few exceptions, are known to have lived in the 19th century, the information that Fuad Köprülü provides indicates that the poet-musicians who travelled in the 13th century among the different classes of people and the migratory tribes with musical instruments called çöğür (lute or guitar) in hand and for that reason were called çöğürcü. This information never puts in doubt the fact that the Turkish minstrels had existed earlier and had served as the example that shaped and formed the Armenians and their type of literature. Köprülü pointed out that ever since the reign of Murat IV (1623-164 the minstrels had increased in number and the poems of the famous ones spread and were recited as far as the boundaries of Baghdad and throughout the length of the Danube and Ozi. The 17th century was a golden age for Ottoman minstrels. Bahşi who participated in the Iranian and Egyptian expeditions of Yavuz Selim, Kul Mehmed (death: 1606), Öksüz Dede and so on are Ottoman minstrels known to belong to the 16th century. 4. Newspapers and periodicals. Berberian gives a list of this type of publications and registers the publishers and the dates. Among these but aside from the ones in Istanbul, some appeared in Amasya (Amasia, 1911-1914), Bursa (Hüdavendigâr, 1869), Erzurum (Envar-i fiarkiyye 1867-1877), Kayseri (Rehber, 1912-1913), Ayintap (Mendor, 1884) and in some other cities. There is another type of Armenian literature that Berberian does not discuss: Armenian satirical literature. The publications in this field are divided into three sections: the Tanzimat period (1839-1876), the Young Turk period (1908-1914) and later. In the press of the Tanzimat era, the letters are in the Armenian alphabet and the texts in Turkish. This is further proof that the great majority of the Istanbul Armenians used Turkish as their mother language. According to Anahide Ter-Minassian whom I have benefited from on this subject, there were 18 satirical Armenian newspapers in Istanbul between 1908 and 1914. One of these was Gavroş. It was published between 1908 and 1914 under this name and later under another name for a short time. Its owner Yervant Toloyan was an Armenian, his father a journalist too. Yervant studied in Armenian schools and at Saint-Benoit. He published his newspaper in Paris between 1925 and 1935. In Gavroş he did not hesitate about criticizing, not just Ottoman society and its administrators, but also the Armenian Church, those who served in all of its offices, the hangers-on and the revolutionary Armenian organisations, Dashnag and Hinchag. In 1936, he immigrated to Soviet Armenia and was arrested a few months later. From 1937 onwards nothing further was heard of him. 5. Grave stones. Berberian refers to them very briefly. He notes publications connected with the gravestones with Armenian letters and Turkish texts (armeno-turc) in Kayseri, Bursa, Ankara, Istanbul, Beşiktaş and Yeni Mahalle. Music Sadun Aksüt separates Turkish music into two parts on the basis of the system: (1) "Turkish Music composed of Turkish rules and tunes based on the Turkish system, that is, on Turkish progressions and requiring Turkish sazs or hand-played instruments and Turkish voices. (2) Turkish Music composed using the fundamentals of the Western system, that is, on Western tempo progressions and requiring Western instruments". The writer has called the former "Traditional Turkish Music" in order to differentiate one from the other. There are those who claim that this music has Iranian, Arabic, Greek or Byzantine roots. Hüseyin Sadettin Arel (1880-1955) proves, in his work entitled Türk Musikisi Kimindir, that this music is not of foreign origin, but to the contrary, the aforementioned countries were influenced by this music and abandoned their earlier music systems. Ercümend Berker (born 192 also says: "The Turkish music system is one that the Turks brought from Central Asia and developed in the Near East. It was not taken from the Arabs, Iranians or Greeks...This music is presented to us in the city, the palace and the mansion as introductory pieces, composition, vocal music and songs; in the mosque as the call to prayer, prayers, Mevlevi services vocal sections and religious compositions; in the convent as eulogy poems, religious prayer, religious musical service, a form of religious music, hymns and Bektaşi hymns; in the village as folk songs, folk music without a rhythmic pattern, dance music and musical work composed for dancing; on the borders as the frontier folk song; and in the military barracks as military band music". Among the composers too are sultans, statesmen, convent shaikhs, palace attendants, members of the Janissary corps, rich people and landowners and people of Armenian, Greek or Jewish origin. O angelface, heart and soul I am in love with you; Darling, could anyone love you the way I do? I want you in private for a moment or two: It´s been many days since the last time I saw you. The song in the Persian-Kurdish style that begins with these lines was taken from a poem by the famous statesman and poet of Mahmut II´s reign, Mehmed Sait Pertev Paşa (1785-1837). The composer Nikogos Ağa (1836-1885) was an Ottoman Armenian born in Istanbul in Hasköy. He took lessons from Hammami-zade ismail Dede Efendi (1778-1846) and his student Dellal-zade ismail Efendi (1797-1869). Yilmaz Öztuna, speaking of Armenian language sources such as Kevork Pamukciyan and some Armenian writers and relying on what they told him, notes that Nikogos A a also learned Turkish music "because Armenian church music uses Turkish musical lines and rules". Sixty-three songs by this composer who went on to visit the Mevlevihanes and sang songs there reached our day and Öztuna in his article gives the tunes and the first verses. The words of one of Tanburi Nikogos Ağa´s Hicazkâr tune is by the celebrated Ottoman poet Ziya Paşa: Soon nightfall will be here and light of day will be all through; On the riverbank, the shepherd will play his flute, all blue; You are young and tender, may your creator protect you. Run and join your herd lest the wolf snatch you, my lovely lamb; Come, don´t lose your lover, come, my little one, here I am. It is also understood that he himself wrote the words to some of his songs. You are the sovereign among all beauties and At your door, as a slave of yours I stand: I beg you, do not let go of my hand. My master, my sovereign, my sultan, May my life be sacrificed to you.
|
