Ergenekon legend
The Ergenekon legend is a modern national Turkish legend propagated at the beginning of the 20th century , which goes back to a compilation of partly very old Central Asian motifs and set pieces. It is about the disintegration and reconstruction of the Turkish Empire (meaning the Ottoman Empire and its emerging successor state, the modern Turkish Republic ), whereby the events are set back in the time of the legendary prehistory of the Kök Turks in Central Asia. It is commonly regarded as the origin myth of the Turkish tribes and the Turkic states that exist today . The legend is named after a fabulous valley in which the ancestors of the early Turks are said to have found refuge.
Lore
Central elements of the tradition are on the one hand the descent from a wolf, on the other hand the persecution of the early Turks, who withdrew into an inaccessible valley, in which they developed and multiplied until they emerged again from the valley and the stage of history again could enter.
A lineage myth in which a she-wolf plays a role was mentioned in Central Asia in the Shiji of the first great Chinese historian Sima Qian († 85 BC) regarding the descent of the Wu-sun . A myth with the descent from a wolf can be found in Chinese sources in the 6th century regarding the descent of the tujue (突厥) , also referred to as T'u-chüeh or T'u-küe (see Asena legend ), and later (Middle of the 13th century) in the Secret History of the Mongols regarding the descent of the Mongols.
The central motif of the Ergenekon myth, on the other hand, is the growing up of the descendants of persecuted refugees in a valley surrounded by mountains to a tribe / nation and the leaving of this valley. This motif in connection with the descent from a she-wolf can be found for the first time in the myths of origin of the Tujue, the ancient Turks and later in the myth of the origin of the Mongols. The motif of the descent from a wolf / a she-wolf recedes more and more in the later versions of the legend.
Chinese tradition of the origin myth of the Turks
In a Chinese tradition from the year 629 contained in the Zhou Shu , the legend is presented as follows: A nomad people was attacked and destroyed by a neighboring people. One boy survived the massacre. A wolf took him and led him into a valley surrounded by rocks. The boy and the she-wolf united and she bore him ten cubs, the progenitors of the ten tribes. The founder of the Ashina clan was the most intelligent. He rose to be the ruler of the Tʾu-chüeh. After a few generations they left the valley and submitted to Juan Juan . The Chinese also pass on deviating variants of the original myth of the Turks, which, in addition to the aforementioned almost identical words, can also be found in the works Sui Shu and Bei Shi , which were written only a little later . In these works, however, no name is given for the valley which the Turks used as a refuge.
The Ergenekon lore
Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur (* 1603; † 1663), Khan of Khiva 1643–1663, who used a work by the Ilkhanid vizier Raschīd ad-Dīn for his Shajara-i turk, handed down a similar story about the flight into a valley . This story is presented like this:
When the Tatars attacked the Mongols, only two of the Mongols, Kiyan and Nukuz, were able to save themselves in a difficult-to-access valley in the mountains called Ergene-Kün. After the valley became too small for their descendants, they looked for a way out of the valley. A man experienced in metallurgy had noticed that one of the mountains surrounding the valley had ore veins. With the help of 70 bellows made from the skin of horses, they melted the ore, escaped from the valley and took revenge on the Tatars. The name of this man is passed down with Börte Čine . The blue-gray wolf, the progenitor of the Mongols, has the same name in the Secret History of the Mongols.
Ottoman and national Turkish reception
The work of Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur was translated from Chagata into Ottoman by the Ottoman official and politician Ahmed Vefik Pascha (1818–1891) . In the years around and between the Balkan Wars and the Turkish Liberation War , the original legend of the Turks was combined with the Ergenekon tradition of Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur by nationalist writers such as Ziya Gökalp or Ömer Seyfettin , and the Mongolian tradition was adopted in Turkish. This takeover was all the easier as Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur spoke Uzbek (Tschagatai) Turkish, but as a descendant of Genghis Khan was of Mongolian descent. Also Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu wrote at this time a work entitled Ergenekon , but treated in events of the liberation war.
Today's meaning
There are several text versions of the myth in circulation in the Turkish-speaking world. What they have in common is a devastating defeat of the Turks at the beginning, the flight of the few survivors into the closed Ergenekon valley, the growth of their descendants into a great nation for which the valley became too narrow and finally the exodus from the valley with the help of a wolf who showed a path and based on the idea of a blacksmith who made the path out of the valley passable by melting the iron mountain. The Ergenekon legend and the gray wolf are popular motifs that are used in their music and art as well as depicting history.
Above all, national, Kemalist and right-wing groups and writers have taken up the motif of the gray wolf and the Ergenekon myth, but given it different meanings. Karaosmanoğlu sees z. B. During the Turkish Liberation War Ankara as the new Ergenekon and as a symbol of the hope of all oppressed peoples, while today's ultra-right Turkish nationalists see Ergenekon as a necessary evil in preparation for the true vocation of the Turkish nation. In a version of the Ergenekon myth originating from these circles, the wolf comes to the fore over the blacksmith, and the two refugees into the valley are Oğuz (the eponym of the Oghuz ) and Kayı (the clan from which the Ottoman dynasty descended).
The legend thus became a cornerstone of right-wing ideologies, which saw in the legend a parable for the current situation in Turkey and its plans for its future. The empire of the Kok-Turks broke up, like the Ottoman empire , for which in the legend, as well as in the opinion of the right-wing forces, mainly external, "non-Turkish" peoples are held responsible. In an ahistorical way, the terms nation (Turkish: millet , which word originally only referred to the non-Muslim religious communities in the Ottoman Empire) and state are used. However, these terms are irrelevant for the Kökturks as for other early nomadic empire formations, since tribal affiliation or loyalty to a tribal chief was decisive for the worldview and the ruling organization of the equestrian nomads. Similar to the Kokturks, according to this view, the Turks should have fled to a promising paradise (the Ergenekon Valley of the Kokturks / Anatolia for the modern) and first had to regenerate (the voluntary isolation of the Kokturks / the political isolation of the Turkish Republic after their Foundation phase) before they could once again fight for their place in world history. The goal of history is the renewed flourishing of the Turks, which the right-wing forces dream of.
In this version of the legend from the right camp there is an indication that every year a ceremony is held to commemorate the day of the exodus from the Ergenekon valley, during which the leader of the Turkish nation and his dignitaries one after the other a heated piece Forging iron on an anvil.
This detail was taken up at the opening of the first Central Asia summit of the Turkish republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the form that the individually entering heads of state hit a piece of iron with a small hammer, as a symbol of the iron gate that protected the Gök Turks and had to be torn down in order to be able to enter world affairs again.
This blacksmith scene was used from the 1990s to declare the Kurdish Newroz Festival , the central figure of which is also a blacksmith who saved his people, as Old Turkish.
In contemporary parlance, the myth gave its name to the alleged Turkish underground network Ergenekon and a state affair of the same name that led to long-term investigations and numerous arrests of Turkish politicians, professors, journalists, lawyers and high-ranking soldiers.
See also
literature
- Daniel Steinvorth: Dark and Dangerous Times . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 2008, p. 102 f . ( online ).
- Erkan Altiok: Turkish Mythology . Istanbul 1991
- Yilmaz Öztuna: Osmanli Devleti Tarihi . Volume 1. Istanbul 1986, p. 24, paragraph 6, Göktürken and their origins
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ergenekon . In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam . New Edition.
- ↑ German translations of the Chinese sources can be found annotated by Liu Mau-Tsai: The Chinese News on the History of the Eastern Turks (T'u-küe). Wiesbaden 1958, Volume 1, p. 5 f .: The T'u-küe in the time of the Nord-Wei (386-534), West-Wei (535-556) and Nord-Tschou (556-581), p 40 f .: The T'u-küe in the Sui period (581–617), as well as comments on the sources on p. 473 f.
- ↑ Denis Sinor, Inner Asia, Bloomington, Ind., 1987, Indiana University Uralic and Altaic series, Volume 96, pp. 247 f. and 125
- ↑ "Ergenekon Efsanesi kime ait?" ( Memento of July 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), Zaman , February 22, 2009, accessed December 9, 2012 (Turkish)
- ↑ Ali Duymaz, Ömer Seyfettin'in Kaleme Aldığı Destanlar Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme “, Balıkesir Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi cilt: 12, sayı: 21, Haziran 2009, p. 415. (PDF; 105 kB), accessed December 9, 2012 ( Turkish)
- ↑ The Turkish text of Ziya Gökalp's work can be found here
- ↑ Orhan Çekiç, Makaleler / Ergenekon , accessed December 9, 2012 (Turkish)
- ↑ a b c d Emre Arslan: The myth of the nation in the transnational space: Turkish gray wolves in Germany . Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-531-16866-1 (print) 978-3-531-91867-9 (online), page 104 ff. ( Preview on GoogleBooks )
- ↑ Helmut Oberdiek: The deep state . In: Amnesty International Journal , October 2008
- ↑ Turkey Bulletin 07/09 ( Memento from September 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 89 kB) Naumann Foundation