A UNKNOWN CHAGATAY GHAZAL OF KAYGUSUZ ABDAL

Abstract

In this article, a nine-couplet Chagatay ghazal by Kaygusuz Abdal—who lived in the late 14th and the first half of the 15th century—housed in the Marburg Manuscript at the Berlin Library and previously unknown to the scholarly world, has been published, and the deep cultural and literary ties between the Anatolian and Turkestan spheres have been thoroughly examined. The study outlines the developmental trajectory of the Western and North-Eastern Turkic branches formed after Old Turkic, and evaluates the decisive impacts of Chagatay Turkic, which reached its zenith during the era of Timur and his sons, on Ottoman poets and poetics. It is noted that Alaaddin Gaybi, the son of the Sanjak Bey of Alanya, masterfully utilized both syllabic and prosodic meters by synthesizing folk and divan poetry, incorporating subconscious imagery bearing a surrealist nature alongside classical religious-Sufi elements in his works. As a result of phonetic and morphological analyses of the text, it has been meticulously determined that Eastern Turkic features such as vocal reductions, flattening, possessive suffixes, and consonant shifts are densely present in the poet's corpus. The original text and transcription of the ghazal, written in the “Mefâîlün Mefâîlün Feûlün” meter of the hezec bahrain, have been presented to the scholarly community; furthermore, the strong parallels demonstrated by Kaygusuz Abdal's vocabulary of Uighur origin with proverbs, idioms, and formulas found in Divânü Lügati't-Türk and Dede Korkut texts have been revealed. Accordingly, it is understood that the literary interaction between the two spheres was not limited merely to textual transmission, but was rather the product of a shared language and mental universe. The unshakable memory bridges established between the geographies of Anatolia and Turkestan via historical cultural transmission networks centered around the Silk Road, Spice Road, and Hajj Route have been scrutinized, bringing to light the richness of the common civilization basin formed along the line of Ahmed Yesevî, Yunus Emre, Kaygusuz Abdal, and Ali Shīr Nevāyī.