Abstract:

The epic narratives of Koroglu has been told and known among all the Turkic speaking people who live in the geographical area from the Eastern Turkestan to Balkans that is called Turkic world. Besides the Turkic speaking people, the narratives of Koroglu has also been non-Turkic people in the region. As one of the neighbor country of Turks Iran is the first place where the epic narratives of Koroglu were collected. Alexander Chodzko, who worked as an officer at the Russian Embassy in Iran, in between 1830-1841, and while working at the embassy he had collected or had made collected 13 episodes Koroglu in Iran, and published those text in London, in 1842. Although there has been number of scholarly studies have been carried on the Koroglu epic narratives collected from Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and eastern Turkestan, since A. Chodzko’s first publication of Koroglu narratives collected from the Turks living in Iran, there has been no study or publication in Turkey. In order to make use in my PhD thesis, I have carried on number of fieldworks in Iran, in between 2011-2018 and during which I have collected number Koroglu epic narratives from the Turks living in different regions of Iran. One of the Koroglu episodes I had collected during those fieldworks is the episode named “Koroglu’s Journey to Istanbul” that was narrated by Ashik Meşi Paşayi. The subject matter of this episode is Koroglu’s marriage to Nigar Hanım who had fallen in love with Koroglu and asks him to take her from Istanbul to Chamlibel where Koroglu and his brave man reside. The importance of this episode is to be told in accordance with the narration technique special to the Koroglu narratives among Turkic epic narration traditions. As it has been known that as the whole Koroglu cycle consists of number episodes and a narrator may perform only episode at setting in Iran, and when a narrator of Koroglu is going to perform an episode other than the first episode, the narrator must begin with abstracting the first episode. As a result of summarizing the first episode the narrators both able to provides information on the previous happenings, and prepare their audience to the current episode he is going to narrate. This special Koroglu narration technique of Turkish ashiks living in Iran has also been applied by Ashik Meşi Paşayi while telling the episode of “Koroglu’s Journey to Istanbul”. In this article, I would like to examine the above mentioned episode in accordance with the “structural reading” which has not been used much by the epic scholars. Most of the epic studies in Turkey based on the “episode” and “motif” analyses, whereas there have been no analyses have made use of the “Syntactical Model” or “Narrative Sequences” which was developed P. Larivaille, J. M. Adams and A.J. Greimas as a new interpretation of the structural analyses developed by V. Propp. Therefore, in my article on the evaluation of the episode of “Koroglu’s Journey to Istanbul”, I would like to fulfill this lack of the usage on this new method that I will make use of both the “Syntactical Model” or “Narrative Sequences”, and the “Actantial Model”. In my evaluation, first I would like to provide a summary of narrative, and then I will examine the text in accordance with the “Syntactical Model” under the “Narrative Sequences”. Then, under the title “Actants and Players” the episode will be fractured into sequences that in accordance with the model there are six actants and each of them will be evaluated according to the players. In my final part, I would like to reach to the conclusions that I will be able to show how each element in the episode has been effecting the main structure of the episode; how each of those elements being included or excluded from the episode and also the result of those inclusion and exclusion, and also while structuring the episode as a whole what kind of a path the narrator is being implied.

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