Abstract:

Poetic histories are literary works giving information about history. Even though according to their contents they were named differently such as fetih-nâme, zafernâme, gazâ-nâme, gazavât-nâme, those names were mostly used interchangeably. The main purpose in most of these works is to do historiography; however, the attempts to present a literary work can also be seen in few of them. Şeh-nâmes are one of the poetic works which are written to state the historical events. Şeh-nâmeci is the name given to the historians of the palace in the Ottoman Empire. Mostly in verse format and adorned with miniatures, şeh-nâmes mention the Ottoman literature history. However, sometimes it is seen that they put the wars of a specific sultan into words. The Şeh-nâme of Ganî-zâde Nâdirî living in the seventeenth century is such a poetic history. Consisted of approximately 2000 verses, the work is a masnavi written in the Şeh-nâme prosody. The topic formed around the Iran wars during the period of Sultan Osman II and in particular his campaigns to Poland. This work can be named as gazavât-nâme due to its content. Ganî-zâde Nâdirî remarked that he wrote Şeh-nâme not to originate a historical work, but to write a masnavi. However, in spite of its exeggerated and partial style, this work is a significant picture which depicts that period and it is also important in that it is the last example of the pictorial poetic histories of Ottoman dynasty. The copy of The Şeh-nâme of Ganîzâde Nâdirî with miniatures is in Topkapı Palace Library. Some of the events told in masnavi were portrayed; in this way, it was attempted to reveal the history in a harmony formed by the two important art: poetry and painting. In this paper, while the difference of Şeh-nâme from the other historical sources was presented, the period of Sultan Osman II was tried to be heard in the prosody of Ganîzâde Nâdiri’s poem, and to be imagined in the colour of miniatures.

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