Özet:

For long centuries the Balkans under the Ottoman rule was a vibrant environment for the flourishing of Turkish language. Both Turks living in the peninsula and other subject peoples of the Empire used Turkish as the language of daily communication, art, literature and finally as media language in the Late Ottoman period. Suffering a serious decline with the shrinking Turkish population following the Balkan Wars, Turkish language disappeared altogether in present-day Greece, with the exception of Western Thrace, as a result of the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923. Under the long Ottoman rule various examples of poetic genres such as gazel, kasîde, mesnevî and şehrengiz were composed in Turkish, which was the most valued language in these vast lands extending up to presentday Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet, fictional texts about daily life in the Balkans, such as novels and stories, unfortunately failed to attract due attention as the products of such a rich historical heritage of the lands in question. In one of his novels and eleven of his stories, i.e. rare examples of such type, Necati Cumalı was inspired by the lives of the last remaining Turks in the Balkans (particularly Greece). Thus, the present study contains an analysis of the language and narrative of the stories about the last Rumelian speakers of Turkish language, which, as a living language, gave birth to folk songs and poems for centuries in the Balkans

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