Neşet Ertaş, the Turkish folk music singer and lyrics writer.[/caption]Âşık [AA-sheuk] n. How the death of a famous singer signals the dying away of one of the most venerable of Turkish traditions.
Âşık [AA-sheuk] n. 1. Suitor, wooer. 2. Minstrel, troubadour, a Turkish-language folk singer who accompanies his songs on the saz, a long-necked, deep-bellied lute that is to Anatolian folk music what the guitar is to flamenco.
The âşık is also known as the ozan [o-ZAN], but the first word—thanks to the connotations given in (1) above—is perhaps more evocative. His songs range from deep melancholy to great gales of whirling, ecstatic energy and sing—like the Blues—of poverty and oppression and belief. Like some rappers, he represents something like a moral stance, an attitude to the world, although in his case religious ideas (in the broadest sense on the word) are much closer to the surface. For Turks, the âşık is the voice of Anatolia. Steppes and pastures and mountains provide a backdrop to his songs as the sea does to Norse sagas. But he is the product of a tradition that extends back to a time when Turks were still in Central Asia and hadn’t become Muslims yet, and even today, as the tradition of the âşık dies out, there is still a whiff of Islamic heterodoxy about much of it, if not of paganism outright.
The great Turkish anthropologist, Ilhan Başgöz, traces many of the most popular themes of classical âşık poetry—above all the motif of the dream—to Central Asian shamanism, and suggests that âşık poetry may have sprung from a sort of sublimation of more overtly pre-Islamic ideas during the 16th century, when the Ottomans stepped up efforts to impose orthodoxy on the Turkish-speaking tribes that lived in the Anatolian hinterland of their empire. It is not surprising that the âşık tradition is strongest among members of a religious community that has borne the brunt of religious persecution since the 16th century, the Alevi, also rather pejoratively known as the kızılbaş, whose beliefs mix some pre-Islamic ideas with a heavy coat of Shi’a Islam.
[inset_left]The coming of the Republic radically changed the fortunes of the âşık tradition.[/inset_left]
The saz plays a central part in Alevi religious ritual, with the saz player sitting to the left of the man who presides over the ceremony and accompanying the ecstatic circular dances that form its climax. Many Alevi refer to the instrument as “the stringed Koran,” and the songs of Alevi âşık are full of justifications of its use in the face of criticism from representatives of Sunni orthodoxy: “Is it inside or outside / Where is the Satan / Is it on the edge or on the inlay? / Where is the Satan in this instrument,” asks Âşık Dertli. “It does not object to your ablutions / It does not object to your rituals / It does not take bribes like hodjas and kadis (Shari’a judges) / Where is the Satan in this instrument?”
The coming of the Republic radically changed the fortunes of the âşık tradition. Under the Ottomans, it had been largely ignored as something that Anatolian peasants got up to in their spare time. Under the Republic, it became a symbol of the soul of the new nation. The Republic dreamed of a synthesis of Western urban civilization and Turkish tradition. It had no time for Ottoman court music and poetry, products of what it saw as an eastern—and therefore foreign—civilization.
But it believed strongly in a Turkish “soul”—and it sought it in the villages. Young musicians were sent out into Anatolia to collect the folk songs that would provide the melodic foundations of the new Turkish music Ataturk wanted his composers to create. Famous folk singers were invited to Ataturk's palace in Ankara. (Here, the Republican dream of purity, the synthesis of rural soul and Western appearance, occasionally snagged on reefs of prejudice: when Âşık Veysel—a blind peasant in a dusty black hat and shapeless suit who happened to be the most famous âşık of the twentieth century—came to Ankara from Sivas at the invitation of Ataturk, an over-zealous policeman saw only the peasant in him and tried to expel him from the city whose spotless streets he was dirtying.)
With the coming of multi-party democracy in 1950 and the fall from power of the early Republican elite, the symbolic power of the âşık faded slightly. In the 1960s, when Turkey became divided between pro- and anti-American factions, Anatolian folk songs became a symbol of the left. The new generation of musicians found it easy to adapt the old songs of loss and oppression into a sort of Turkish socialism. Today, Turkey’s cities are full of bars where you can go and listen to songs that were composed by 16th century mystical poets. But the recent resurgence in interest in folk song is little more than an act of nostalgia. These are songs that speak of a rural Turkey, and Turkey isn’t rural any more. Until 1950, 80 percent of the population lived in villages. Now more than 80 percent live in towns. For the town dweller stuck in a tiny flat in grey, concrete streets as deep as canyons, songs of high pastures, lovers living on the other side of the mountain, and semi-mystical experiences under an infinite blue sky are sounds from a simpler age that is long gone. No wonder, when the great ozan Neşet Ertaş died last week, that newspapers spoke of the approaching end of a tradition.
