Abstract:

Tûtî-nâme in Sanskrit is Çukasaptati and it means seventy story by a parrot. Following its translation to Persian the inter-cultural journey of Tûtî-nâme starts and in 1538 upon the orders of Sultan Süleyman the Lawmaker, it gets translated into Turkish most probably by Eyyûbî. The text atracts a mass of readers and it rises to a special place in Turkish classical literature. The importance of the text is in its providing information about the general life and idea of honor of the era, via the didacticism of the stories narrated by the parrot. Especially interesting is the evaluation of the relationship between women and men in this text. In this article, the relationship between women and men in Tûtî-nâme will be analyzed around concepts such as family and honor. To approach a text such as Tûtî-nâme, which carries traces of different cultures and gets richer via transfers and translation between cultures with such focus is necessary to evaluate the roles of femininity and masculinity as they are constructed in opposition to each other, and also to examine values inherent to the foundations of the concept of family.