Destan kültürü ve Türk destanları

Since epics embody a nation’s spiritual values, way of life, and moral orientation as a whole, they bear significant traces of traditions, customs, and religious practices. The fragments of ancient Turkish epics that we possess today have been compiled from various sources. Some of these were obtained by Turkish researchers through the direct collection and transcription of epics still alive in the vernacular, while others were found in ancient Chinese, Arabic, Iranian, and Western sources. The world’s oldest epic tradition belongs to the Turks. As a literary genre, the epic has, over time, lost its original meaning and has given rise to new genres—both in folk and classical literature—that differ in form and content. The epic is also the name of a national verse form recited by aşık poets in Anatolia. In these epics, which are a type of aşık-style poetry, the aşık poets express wars, natural disasters, the events they have experienced, their surroundings, and their personal experiences. Although epics hold great importance for a society, they are among the least explored literary subjects. The number of publications that comprehensively address the topic of epics is so few that they can be counted on one hand. The scarcity of such publications—due to their limited focus on Turkish epics, the lack of general information on the epic genre and references to world epics, and the tendency to treat the epic as a separate category within folk poetry—led us to feel the need for such a study, prompting us to prepare this book titled “Epic Culture and Turkish Epics.” We believe this book, which we are confident will be beneficial to those closely interested in Turkish literature, comprehensively covers the topic of the epic in all its aspects.