Vartan Paşa

Vartan Pasha

Vartan Paşa ( Armenian Վարդան փաշա Wardan P'ascha , actually Osep Vartanian ; * 1813 ; † 1879 ) was an Ottoman civil servant, author, translator and journalist of Armenian origin of the 19th century who was elevated to the rank of Pasha after 30 years of civil service . He wrote the first known novel-like text in Turkish , the 1851 novella "Akabis history" or the story of Agapis ( Akabi Hikayesi ). The text appeared in Turkish, but using Armenian letters , in the bilingual newspaper Mecmua-i Havadis .

Life

Hovsep Vartanian was born in 1813 to Catholic-Armenian parents. At the age of 13 he was sent to an apprenticeship in Venice , where he was enrolled in the Mechitarist School . After returning to Turkey, he worked as a teacher for a number of years. He then took up a position as a dragoman in the Ministry of the Interior of the Ottoman Empire in 1837 . After rising through the ranks of the state bureaucracy, he was raised to the rank of pasha at the same time as he was a founding member of the Ottoman Academy ( Encümen-i Daniş = Society of Knowledge ) based on the model of the Académie française . There, the Scholars Council worked as a liaison directly for the Sultan from 1853 . The founding of this academy caused a sensation in Europe .

He wrote the novella Akabi's story in 1851, while he was already a member of the academy, and a longer narrative in Turkish, which dealt with the great rift and dispute between the Gregorian Catholic Armenians, which also appeared as an intermediate topic in the novella, in Year 1852.

After his retirement he was in charge of the magazine Mecmua-i Havadis , which was published bilingually in Turkish and Armenian. In addition, he published a two-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte and translated some works from French into Turkish. Vartan Pasha died in 1879.

Akabi's story

The plot of the novella is all about an impossible love story between two young people from different backgrounds who had cultivated their hostilities with one another. In this tradition of the Romeo and Juliet theme, various other stories from different cultures emerged through the centuries: from Hero and Leander , Ovid with Pyramus and Thisbe to Romeo and Juliet in the village .

Akabi is the daughter of a Gregorian Armenian and Hagop, her lover, is a Catholic Armenian. Although it is an early novella and the author is male, Akabi's character clearly stands out from the story. Even if Vartan Pasha was himself a Catholic, he describes the course of action between the two warring camps completely objectively. Nevertheless, he does not shy away from criticizing both behavior. The novella is filled with many secondary characters, which are briefly but significantly characterized.

Even when social concerns are addressed superficially or indirectly, the main theme of the story is love, which, like the literary model, ends tragically. Thus one can understand the story as a call for religious tolerance.

This novella stands out not only because of the use of the written Armenian language in Turkey, which was not common during the 19th century and usually differed greatly from the Turkish used by the Armenians living at the time. Furthermore, according to the Austrian Turkologist Andreas Tietze , the novella, which he re-edited and transcribed in 1991 , is the first stand-alone Turkish novella published in Turkey, or, from a more strict perspective, one of the five earliest literary forms differentiated from the usual Ottoman folk literature deviated. Otherwise Sami Frashëri's love affair between Talat and Fitnat ( Ta'aşşuk-i Tal'at ve Fitnat ), dating from 1872, is regarded as the first Turkish novella. In the presentation of these five works, Gonca Gökalp from Hacettepe University pointed out that the Cretan Turk Giritli Ali Aziz Efendi was the first work with his work Muhayyelât from 1796, followed by "Akabi's Story" in 1851, followed by Hayalat-ı Dil written by Hasan Tevfik (1868), Temaşa-i Dünya by Evangelinos Misailidis, an Anatolian Greek from Kula (1872) and Müsameretname by Emin Nihat Bey (1875). Despite the fact that the work was published in Turkish, the background is completely Armenian, because Armenian was then almost exclusively limited to the liturgy .

expenditure

• Vartan Paşa: Akabi Hikâyesi: İlk Türkçe Roman. Edited by Andreas Tietze, Eren Yayınevi, İstanbul 1991
• Hovsēpʿ Vardanean: Agapii patmutʿiwnē. Zartʿōnkʿ, Pēyrutʿ 1954. Translation into Armenian .

literature

• Suraiya Faroqhi: Culture and Everyday Life in the Ottoman Empire. Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39660-7 , p. 293f.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Johannes Thomann: Islamic borders and border crossings . Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, a. a., p. 141.
2. ^ Johann Strauss: Functionality of individual languages ​​and the role of translations using the example of the Ottoman Empire . In: Harald Kittel , Juliane House , Brigitte Schultze (eds.): Traduction: encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction . Volume 2 = raduction: encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction. Tome 2, W. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2007, pp. 1238-1250. Here p. 1247.
3. ↑ Suraiya Faroqhi: Culture and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire. Beck, Munich 1995, p. 294.
4. ↑ Five intermediate works in the beginning of the Turkish novel in the Ottoman era, Dr. Gonca Gökalp, 1998 ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Turkish; PDF; 1.2 MB), abstract (English) 
5. ↑ Suraiya Faroqhi: Culture and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire. Beck, Munich 1995, p. 293.