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Patterns of Prejudice
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A pilgrim's progress: Armenian and

Kurdish literatures in Turkish and the
rewriting of literary history
Laurent Mignon
Published online: 08 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Laurent Mignon (2014) A pilgrim's progress: Armenian and Kurdish literatures
in Turkish and the rewriting of literary history, Patterns of Prejudice, 48:2, 182-200, DOI:
10.1080/0031322X.2014.904554

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2014.904554

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 Patterns of Prejudice, 2014
Vol. 48, No. 2, 182–200, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2014.904554

A pilgrim’s progress: Armenian and Kurdish

literatures in Turkish and the rewriting of literary
history

LAURENT MIGNON

ABSTRACT John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is a narrative that has been
translated into Turkish several times. Strangely, histories of Turkish literature and
of literary translations into Turkish rarely make any reference to it. The fact that the
early translations were in Armeno-Turkish and that they were promoted by
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Protestant missionary organizations might explain why they were ignored in the
historiography of a field in which the contributions of non-Muslims are hardly
acknowledged. In recent years, however, Armeno-Turkish literature has become a
new area of study in Turkey. Young scholars, mostly in Turkey’s leading private
universities, have started to explore Armeno-Turkish literature and the exchanges
between western Armenian and Turkish literatures in the Ottoman Empire, and have
challenged the nationalist discourse underpinning traditional Turkish literary histori-
ography. Mignon’s paper gives an overview of Armeno-Turkish literary studies from
the rare early republican scholarly publications on the topic to the latest postgraduate
research projects on the Armeno-Turkish novel and on nineteenth-century Turkish
and western Armenian dramatic traditions. His paper also discusses recent debates on
Kurdish poets writing in Turkish and ‘literature in Turkish’, in contra-distinction to
Turkish literature, which have opened new spaces of freedom that should facilitate an
integration of Armeno-Turkish literature into mainstream Turkish literary history.
Beyond academic debates on the challenges to cultural historiography and literary
theory, the rediscovery of Armeno-Turkish literature and the acknowledgment of
Armenian contributions to Turkish literature represent a major opportunity in the
Turkish context to reassess the place of non-Muslim ethnoreligious communities in
late Ottoman political and cultural history.

KEYWORDS Armeno-Turkish literature, Armeno-Turkish relations, Kurdish literature,

literary historiography, minority literature, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Turkish literature

T urkish literary historiography is a field of scholarship in which the

contributions of non-Muslim authors and intellectuals are seldom
acknowledged. The history of Turkish translations of John Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress is a case in point. Though translated several times, this
narrative is rarely referred to in histories of Turkish literature and of literary
translations into Turkish. The fact that the early translations were in Armeno-
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
 LAURENT MIGNON 183

Turkish and that they were promoted by Protestant missionary organizations

might explain why they have been ignored, but this absence is also indicative
of the way literary historians have espoused a definition of nationhood that
equated Turkishness with Muslimhood.
Literary history is never ‘only’ the history of a literature. Historiography is
the product of its time and place. Throughout much of the twentieth century,
literary historians in Turkey believed that their role was to portray the
development of Turkish nationhood through its literary production. They
might have disagreed on how to define ‘Turkishness’, yet they were united in
their belief that there was no place for non-Muslims in the framework of
national culture. In recent years, however, the nationalist approach to Turkish
literary history has been questioned and Armeno-Turkish literature has
become a new area of research in Turkey. Young scholars, mostly in Turkey’s
leading private universities, have started to explore Armeno-Turkish literat-
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ure and the exchanges between western Armenian and Turkish literatures in
the Ottoman Empire, and have challenged the nationalist discourse under-
pinning traditional Turkish literary historiography.
Beyond academic debates on the challenges to cultural historiography and
literary theory, the rediscovery of Armeno-Turkish literature and the
acknowledgement of Armenian contributions to Turkish literature represent
a major opportunity in the Turkish context to reassess the place of non-
Muslim ethnoreligious communities in late Ottoman political and cultural
history. This is an important dimension of the critical engagement with late
Ottoman history that could ultimately open up the road for a rapprochement
between communities in Turkey, the Armenian diaspora and the republics of
Armenia and Turkey.
This article will focus on the literary aspects of the debate. First, I will
discuss the significance of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the context of Turkish
literary history and the concept of ‘Turco-Christian literature’, exploring
possible reasons for their exclusion from historiography. Then, I will give an
overview of Armeno-Turkish literary studies from the rare early republican
scholarly publications, which minimized the role of Armeno-Turkish authors,
to the latest postgraduate research projects focused on the Armeno-Turkish
novel and on nineteenth-century Turkish and western Armenian dramatic
traditions. Finally, I will discuss recent debates on Kurdish poets writing in
Turkish and ‘literature in Turkish’, in contra-distinction to Turkish literature,
which have opened new spaces of freedom that should facilitate an
integration of Armeno-Turkish literature into mainstream Turkish literary
history.

The Pilgrim lost

In his 1666 autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, written

during his twelve-year sentence in Bedford jail, John Bunyan noted in a
 184 Patterns of Prejudice

moment of doubt: ‘The tempter would also assault me with this—“How can
you tell but that the Turks had as good scriptures to prove their Mahomet the
Saviour, as we have to prove our Jesus is?”’1 Little did he know that another
work he was writing during those years of imprisonment—The Pilgrim’s
Progress, originally published in 1678—would become one of the most
translated literary works in Turkish. Nevertheless, even twenty-first-century
readers browsing the numerous histories of Turkish literature and studies on
literary translations in Turkish would find scant reference to the various
Turkish versions of what is undeniably the reformed Baptist preacher’s
masterwork.
The first Turkish translation dates from 1864 and was printed in Istanbul,
the Ottoman capital, at Harutyun Minasyan’s press. The text was published in
Armeno-Turkish (Turkish written in the Armenian script) and was among the
earliest western literary works to be translated into Turkish.2 In 1876–7 two
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short pamphlets summarizing episodes of Bunyan’s magnum opus were

published in İzmir, a large cosmopolitan city-port on the Aegean Sea, again
in an Armeno-Turkish translation.3 In the same years, a Karamanlı version
(Turkish written in the Greek script) was published.4 Hagop Boyajiyan’s press
reprinted the 1864 edition with a revised title in 1881.5 Ottoman Turkish
translations (Turkish written in the Ottoman script, a version of the Perso-
Arabic alphabet) were soon to follow: the first printed in Shumen (now in
Bulgaria), translated by the convert Abdülmesih Yuhenna Avidaranyan, in
1905,6 and re-edited in Plovdiv in 1908.7 The second was published in
Istanbul in 1923 in Mustafa Necati’s translation, which was revised in 1932,
after the alphabet reform, in the Latin script, and again in 1967.8 In 1961 an
abridged version in modern Turkish was published by the American Board of

1 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, or The Brief Relation of the Exceeding
Mercy of God in Christ to His Poor Servant John Bunyan (Glasgow: Porteous and Hislop
1863), 39.
2 John Bunyan, Kristiyan’ın Yolculuğu: Bu Dünyadan Gelecek Dünyaya, Rüya Şeklinde
Yapılmış (Istanbul: H. Minasyan 1864).
3 John Bunyan, Kristiyan’ın Gelecek Şehre Doğru Olan Yolculuğu (İzmir: Dedeyan 1876) and
Kristiyan’ın Gemiyle Ahrete Doğru Olan Yolculuğu (İzmir: Dedeyan 1877).
4 John Bunyan, Hristiyan Yolculuğu (Istanbul: A. H. Boyajiyan 1879). See also Johann
Strauss, ‘Is Karamanli literature part of a “Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian)
literature”?’, in Evangelia Balta and Matthias Kappler (eds), Cries and Whispers in
Karamanlidika Books (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag 2010), 153–200 (180).
5 John Bunyan, Kristiyan Yolculuğu, Yani, Müminin Helak Şehrinden Semavi Şehre Seyahatı,
trans. by Abdülmesih Yuhenna Avidaranyan (Istanbul: A. H. Boyajiyan 1881).
6 John Bunyan, Yolcunun Azimeti, Bu Dünyadan Gelecek Dünyaya, trans. by Abdülmesih
Yuhenna Avidaranyan (Shumen: Avidaranyan Press 1905).
7 John Bunyan, Mesihin Seyahatnamesi: Bu Dünyadan Gelen Dünyaya (Plovdiv: Avidar-
anyan Press 1908).
8 John Bunyan, Hac Yolunda: Bu Dünyadan Öteki Dünyaya, trans. by Mustafa Necati
(Istanbul: Agop Matyosyan 1923; revised Istanbul: Selâmet Matbaası 1932 and
Istanbul: Redhouse Yayınevi 1967).
 LAURENT MIGNON 185

Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Istanbul, translated by Nurhan Acar

and Paul Nilson, and illustrated by Sevinç Tiryakigil,9 and, in 1987, a
translation by Bünyamin Candemir was printed.10 The most recent transla-
tion—by Umut Alper Ceylan—was published in 2003 by İnkılap, one of
Turkey’s leading publishers.11
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is a book that has had an extraordinary
history. Not only is it considered the progenitor of the English novel and a
milestone in the English literary canon, but it is also a Christian allegory
whose Protestant theological background made it a near-perfect missionary
text for Protestant proselytizers. Bunyan’s major work thus ended up being
one of the most translated English literary works. Still, the missionary zeal
needed to promote an evangelical message in Ottoman Turkey should not
hide the fact that The Pilgrim’s Progress is also a great work of literature, ‘as
original as anything can be’,12 not least because Bunyan’s exploration of the
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complexity of human nature and his rich characterization surpassed the

boundaries of traditional allegories and heralded the advent of a new genre:
the novel. In her groundbreaking reassessment of Bunyan as a transnational
author, Isabel Hofmeyr reminds her readers that The Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘as a
near-Bible… was both secular and sacred; serious and pleasurable, fictional
yet also “true”’.13 The rationale behind translations into Turkish, whether in
Armeno-Turkish, Karamanlı, Ottoman or modern Turkish, in the nineteenth,
twentieth or even twenty-first century, is similarly ambiguous, and the
motives of both translators and readers appear to be mixed. It is true that the
principal motivation seems to have been the religious one: Yuhenna
Avidaranyan, born Muhammed Şükrü Efendi, who had converted to an
Armenian Evangelical church and was proselytizing among Turkish-speaking
Muslims in Bulgaria, prepared his translation by transliterating the Armeno-
Turkish translation that ‘the American missionaries [had] intended for the
Turkish-speaking Armenians’.14 Similarly Mustafa Necati’s 1923 translation
was commissioned by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions. Nevertheless, at this time, when the intellectual elite of Ottoman
Turkey had turned towards the West and were promoting western literatures
as a model for the rejuvenation of Turkish literature, there is little doubt that

9 John Bunyan, Müminin Yolculuğu, trans. from the English by Nurhan Acar and Paul
Nilson (Istanbul: American Board Neşriyat Dairesi 1961).
10 John Bunyan, İnanlınin Yolculuğu, Yeruşalim Yolculuğu, trans. by Bünyamin Candemir
(Istanbul: Doyuran Matbaası 1987).
11 John Bunyan, Çarmıh Yolculuğu (Yeruşalim Yolculuğu), trans. by Umut Alper Ceylan
(Istanbul: İnkılap 2003).
12 Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (Harmondsworth: Penguin
1958), 32.
13 Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress
(Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2004), 18.
14 John Avetaranian, A Muslim Who Became a Christian: The Story of John Avetaranian (born
Muhammad Shukri Efendi), ed. Richard Schäfer, trans. from the German by John Bechard
(Hertford: Authors OnLine 2002), 136.
 186 Patterns of Prejudice

many readers who seized upon translations of Bunyan’s work read it above
all as a literary work, as a proto-novel or ‘Defoe’s ancestor’ (as the Marxist
critic Murat Belge called it).15 For authors such as Hovsep Vartanyan or
Ahmed Midhad Efendi, pioneers of the novel in Turkish who, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were exploring ways of bridging
traditional storytelling with the modern novel, Bunyan’s text was of interest.
Despite this long history of translations into Turkish, John Bunyan’s work is
notably absent from histories of Turkish literature (which usually include a
chapter or two on literary translations) and even from the scholarly volumes
that deal with the history of translations into Turkish. Whether or not
translations of Bunyan have been deliberately edited out of the history of
literary activities in Ottoman Turkey is open to debate. As indicated above, it
is true that the motivations of Bunyan’s translators might not always have
been literary. The fact that both Armeno-Turkish and Ottoman Turkish
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translations were promoted by Protestant missionary organizations that were

mainly aiming at converting the Christian communities of the Empire, and
(more rarely, and even less successfully) heterodox Alevi and orthodox Sunni
Muslim communities, might explain why scholars and critics have decided to
exclude those texts from their versions of literary history. Such an attempt at
justification is unsatisfactory however, as—once published—the texts also
existed as literary works independent of the original aims of missionary
organizations. As a result, ignoring translations of Bunyan’s work is difficult
to legitimize on literary and historical grounds: the first Turkish translation of
‘Defoe’s ancestor’ was printed in 1864, the very year Ahmed Lütfü Efendi’s
rendition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published.16 The concurrence
of these two translations offers historians and critics the (as yet unexplored)
possibility of studying in parallel the reception of these two founding texts
of the English novel—the progenitor and its generic descendant—in a
nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish literary world profoundly shaken by
the discovery and appropriation of new literary genres.
The absence of translations of The Pilgrim’s Progress from Turkish scholarly
literature and historiography is characteristic of the way contributions made
by non-Muslims to Turkish literature have generally been ignored by
mainstream literary historiography and criticism.17 It is true, however, that

15 Murat Belge, Edebiyat Üstüne Yazılar (Istanbul: İletişim 2000), 56.

16 Daniel Defoe, Hikâye-i Robenson, trans. by Ahmed Lütfü Efendi (Istanbul: Takvimhane-i
Âmire Matbaası 1864).
17 On this topic, see Laurent Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar (Istanbul: İletişim
2009), 121–32; Laurent Mignon, ‘Lost in transliteration: a few remarks on the Armeno-
Turkish novel and Turkish literary historiography’, in Evangelia Balta and Mehmet
Sönmez (eds), Between Religion and Language (Istanbul: Eren 2011), 111–23 (119–22); and
Laurent Mignon, ‘Minor literatures and their challenge to “national literature”: the
Turkish case’, in Shane Brennan and Marc Herzog (eds), Turkey and the Politics of
National Identity: Social, Economic and Cultural Transformation (London: I. B. Tauris 2014
forthcoming).
 LAURENT MIGNON 187

the role played by non-Muslims as translators is occasionally acknowledged,

the more so if—like Teodor Kasap, the publisher of the first Ottoman Turkish
humour magazine Diyojen and daring translator of Molière—they used the
Ottoman Arabic script and pursued an Ottomanist agenda that was critical of
ethnoreligious demands for greater autonomy and recognition. Translators
who used the alphabets of their own community’s language, on the other
hand, have largely been overlooked, except by rare literary historians such as
İsmail Habib Sevük, whose Avrupa Edebiyatı ve Biz (European Literature and
Us), an early attempt at comparative literary history, lists a significant number
of Armeno-Turkish translations of western literary works. The Pilgrim’s
Progress, however, is not one of them.18
Two aspects of Bunyan’s text are most probably responsible for its
disappearance from the annals of literary history. First, because of its
Protestant missionary sponsors, it is seen as an overtly Christian text, which
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is problematic in a country in which missionary activities are considered a

threat to Turkish identity and national security. Second, the Armeno-Turkish
alphabet in which it was originally printed would have led some scholars to
believe that it was a text exclusively addressing Turkish-speaking Armenian
communities, and could thus not be considered as part of the ‘national
literature’. This, however, overlooks the fact that the Armeno-Turkish
translation was to serve as a basis for the earliest Turkish translations into
the Arabic script made by Avidaranyan. In many ways The Pilgrim’s Progress
in Turkish is a textual incarnation of that ethnoreligious Other with whom
official Turkey in its various guises has had great difficulty engaging: the
Ottoman Armenians. Most historians and scholars of Turkish literature in
Turkey and abroad have appropriated, unconsciously perhaps, the definition
of ‘Turkishness’ that was forged in the first quarter of the twentieth century by
nationalist intellectuals who considered Islam to be a fundamental element,
paying little heed to ethnicity. Adopted by Mustafa Kemal and the republican
leadership, this definition was retrospectively imposed on the multicultural
intellectual landscape of the late Ottoman Empire by literary historians, and
led to the disappearance of non-Muslims from scholarly works exploring
post-Tanzimat literature.19 Armeno-Turkish writers figured prominently
among the early pioneers of the novel in Turkish. Erasing any traces of their
presence might also have been convenient in a post-genocidal context in
which the new Turkish elite did not wish to address the responsibility of the
Ottoman Turkish state for the destruction of the Armenian communities of
Anatolia.

18 İsmail Habib Sevük, Avrupa Edebiyatı ve Biz, 2 vols (Istanbul : Remzi Kitabevi 1940–1).
Sevük, however, mentions the 1932 translation (II, 482).
19 Post-Tanzimat literature refers to the literature that began to be produced in the
aftermath of the westernizing Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and continued throughout the
nineteenth century, a literary period characterized by the appropriation of western
literary genres such as the novel, the short story and the drama, as well as the
transformation of poetry.
 188 Patterns of Prejudice

Turco-Christian texts

It should be noted, however, that some of the earliest western literary texts
translated into Ottoman Turkish had a very strong Christian subtexts that had
largely been overlooked at the time, or was in some cases edited out by the
translators. The French priest François Fénélon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque
(1699), translated in 1859 by Yusuf Kamil Paşa and printed in 1862, was not
only a landmark publication that bridged the gap between the romance and
the novel, but also a narrative that imagined a Utopian Christian state,
making it a strange choice for a Muslim translator.20 Robinson Crusoe, too, was
not exactly an obvious choice. Though this didactic novel about a castaway
and cannibals had everything necessary to seduce an audience thirsting for
tales of extraordinary adventures, its colonialist and missionary subtexts
made it problematic for a mainly Muslim readership: all the more so as
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biblical quotations and references, as well as an outspoken emphasis on

Christian values, abounded in the novel. It is true, however, that Ahmed
Lütfü Efendi’s translation included a mere 114 pages, partly purging it of its
Christian dimension.21 And it is worth keeping in mind that, as surmised by
Johann Strauss in his groundbreaking article ‘Who Read What in the Ottoman
Empire’, the Turkish version may have been based on an anonymous Arabic
translation published by Protestant missionaries in Malta in 1835.22 Another
text that deserves to be mentioned in this context is Recaizade Mahmut
Ekrem’s translation of Silvio Pellico’s Miei Prigioni in 1874.23 In it Pellico, a
Carbonari rebel, 24 related his experiences in Austrian jails, making it one of
the earliest examples of literary memoirs translated into Ottoman Turkish.
The autobiographical text explored some Christian themes, such as the
patient enduring of suffering and the forgiving of wrongdoers, which partly
explains why Namık Kemal, a Young Ottoman intellectual and activist who
had endured his own share of exile and imprisonment and had little time for
what he considered to be Christian themes, was so enraged by it in 1885 that
he wrote an article criticizing the translation and the translator in the journal
Mecmua-ı Ebüzziya.25 These texts by Fénélon, Defoe and Pellico could easily

20 François Fénélon, Tercüme-i Telemak, trans. by Yusuf Kamil Paşa (Istanbul: Matbaa-i
Tasvir-i Efkâr 1862).
21 Defoe, Hikâye-i Robenson.
22 Johann Strauss, ‘Who read what in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th centuries)?’, Middle
Eastern Literatures, vol. 6, no. 1, 2003, 39–76 (46).
23 Silvio Pellico, Mes Prisons Tercümesi, trans. by Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem (Istanbul:
Matbaa-i Tasvir-i Efkâr 1874).
24 The Carbonari were members of a secret revolutionary society that played a major role
in the struggle for Italian unification and the rise of Italian nationalism in post-
Napoleonic Italy.
25 Namık Kemal, ‘Mes Prisons Tercümesi Üzerine Muaheze’, in Kâzım Yetiş (ed.), Nâmık
Kemal’in Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Üzerine Görüşleri ve Yazıları (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi
Basımevi 1989), 236–58. For Pellico’s work in the Ottoman Empire, see Strauss, ‘Who
read what in the Ottoman Empire?’, 62–3. For Christian themes in Turkish literature,
 LAURENT MIGNON 189

have fitted into a Christian literary canon in their respective literary

traditions. The extent to which their translators were aware of this dimension
is obviously open to discussion. One thing is sure however. Avidaranyan—who
transliterated Bunyan into Ottoman Turkish because he did not want Muslims
to believe that ‘Voltaire, Rousseau or the French novels’ were ‘products of
Christian literature’—did not need to worry too much.26 Alternatives to the
secular Enlightenment tradition were readily available. However, by the time
the Turkish convert was writing, Emile Zola, the naturalist novelist, and
Ludwig Büchner, the exponent of scientific materialism, were probably more
influential among members of the progressive intelligentsia in Ottoman Turkey
than François René de Chateaubriand, the founder of French romanticism and
author of Génie du Christianisme (1802), or Antoine Lavoisier, the great pioneer
of modern chemistry who upheld his Christian beliefs.
Nonetheless there is an important difference between the above texts and
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translations of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Unlike Fénélon, Defoe and Pellico,

Bunyan was translated and distributed as part of a Protestant missionary
project. The Pilgrim’s Progress in Turkish is part of a large set of literary and
non-literary texts in Turkish that have been categorized by Johann Strauss as
‘Turco-Christian literature’.27 While the concept of Christian Arabic literature
is not contentious, any Turkish equivalent has been overlooked both in
Turkey and in international Turcology departments. The extent to which
academic studies abroad have uncritically appropriated nationalist Turkish
discourse in questions of literary historiography is one of many issues that
needs further investigation. Much of Christian Turkish literature has been
published in alphabets other than the mainstream Ottoman-Turkish alphabet
—namely, the Armeno-Turkish and Graeco-Turkish (Karamanlı) alphabets—
which differs fundamentally from the Arabic case, in which Christian authors
used the Arabic alphabet. Moreover, Arab Christian intellectuals played a
vital role in the Nahda, the nineteenth-century Arab intellectual renaissance.
In the Ottoman Turkish case, non-Muslims have not featured so prominently
in the literary reform movement, and the contributions they have made
(notably the pioneering role of Armeno-Turkish novelists, as well as the
activities of non-Muslims in the world of theatre and publishing and their
impact on the development of the post-Tanzimat literary world) have largely
been downplayed, if not deliberately ignored. Drawing the borders of Turco-
Christian literature, Strauss notes that it is not only the wide variety of
Armeno-Turkish and Karamanlı literatures that should be included, but also
the works of missionaries in Ottoman Turkish and of Christians writing in the
Ottoman Turkish script. These include not only Teodor Kasap, but also Garbis
Fikri, İstepyan Gordikyan, Hristo, Hristaki, Diyamandi Keçeoğlu and other

see Laurent Mignon, ‘Türkçe Edebiyatta Haçın Gölgesi’, Varlık, no. 1247, August 2011,
16–18.
26 Avetaranian, A Muslim Who Became a Christian, 144.
27 Strauss, ‘Is Karamanli literature part of a “Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian) literature”?’.
 190 Patterns of Prejudice

poets and writers who wrote in Ottoman Turkish. The variety of both secular
and religious literature that can be categorized as Turco-Christian is large
enough to make its exclusion from literary history unjustifiable.
Besides being ‘Christian’ texts, the Turkish translations of The Pilgrim’s
Progress have the other ‘disadvantage’ of having been originally published in
Armeno-Turkish. It has been argued that literatures in the alphabets of
minority communities were only addressing their own communities and thus
had no impact on the Ottoman Turkish literary mainstream. This, however, is
a statement that needs to be taken with more than just a pinch of salt. On the
one hand, Johann Strauss has shown the existence of a common literary
culture that transcended ethnoreligious community boundaries among the
elite in nineteenth-century Istanbul.28 On the other hand, there is textual
evidence that some of the leading lights of the Ottoman Turkish literary
renaissance, namely the novelist, translator and publisher Ahmed Midhat
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Efendi, the publisher İhsan Tokgöz and the novelist Halid Ziya [Uşaklıgil],
were aware of, and had read, Armeno-Turkish works.29 The existence of
primers for the Armenian alphabet,30 even as late as 1917,31 is a further
indicator that invites a revision of the discourse on mutually impermeable
ethnoreligious communities.
It will be clear by now that the focus of this present article is not only an
assessment of the place of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in the history
of Turkish literary translations and in Turkish literary culture, but also about
the integration of literature produced by members of non-Muslim minorities
writing in Turkish in the history of Ottoman Turkish literature. Though it is
obvious that any literary history of the nineteenth century that does not
discuss minority literatures would be deficient, most histories of Turkish
literature, written inside or outside Turkey, have ignored this important
dimension of Ottoman intellectual and cultural life. Perhaps unintentionally,
such histories have thus contributed to an inaccurate depiction of inter-
community relations in Ottoman Turkey that has, in turn, shaped contem-
porary negative perceptions of non-Muslims in Turkey. A more historically
accurate literary historiography, together with the adoption of a category such
as Turco-Christian literature, could make a modest contribution to reconcili-
ation between Turks and Armenians. Modest, because it is doubtful that, in
the twenty-first century, at a time when the place given to the teaching of
literature and its history at pre-university level is eroding, such changes
would have a more substantial impact on the youth. It would, however, be a
step in this direction at least symbolically.

28 Strauss, ‘Who read what in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th centuries)?’.

29 Mignon, ‘Minor literatures and their challenge to “national literature”’.
30 Strauss refers to A. Karamatosyan’s Miftah-ı Kıraat-ı Hurufat-ı Ermeniyye fî Lisân-ı
Osmanî in ‘Is Karamanli literature part of a “Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian)
literature”?’, 182.
31 Ahmed Muhtar, Kendi Kendine Ermenice yahud Mükemmel Ermenice Elifba (Istanbul:
Artin Asaduryan ve Mahdumları Matbaası 1917).
 LAURENT MIGNON 191

Armeno-Turkish texts and their readers

The history of Armeno-Turkish literature remained a marginal area of research

for scholars in Turkey during the twentieth century. This is unfortunate because
Turkish-language publications, whether scholarly, semi-academic or popular,
play a major role in the dissemination of knowledge on this topic as
publications in other languages are rarely read by scholars and students of
post-Tanzimat literature. Hence the importance of works such as ‘Türk
Edebiyatının Ermeni Edebiyatı Üzerindeki Tesirâtı’ (The Influence of Turkish
Literature on Armenian Literature), an article published in the journal of the
Faculty of Letters at the University of Istanbul in March 1922 by Mehmet Fuat
Köprülü, the founding father of Turkish literary historiography, in which he
discusses the close relations between Turkish Muslims and Armenian folk
minstrels.32 Köprülü’s one-sided approach to the question of influence—noting
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only a one-way influence of Turkish poets on Armenian ashugs (troubadours)—

was later largely appropriated by Fikret Türkmen, a nationalist Turcologist, in
his 1992 monograph Türk Halk Edebiyatının Ermeni Kültürüne Tesiri (The
Influence of Turkish Folk Poetry on Armenian Culture).33 Köprülü’s work
showcased the existence of a literary culture shared by Muslim Turks and
Christian Armenians, at least in the domain of folk literature. His comparative
study, biased as it was, arguably kept alive the heritage of Armenian folk
literature in Anatolia, even though he wrote his article in reaction to Archag
Tchobanian’s 1906 Les Trouvères arméniens (The Armenian Troubadours).34
Another semi-academic article of the time was the pedagogue Muallim Cevdet
(İnançalp)’s study of the scientific activities of the Armenian Catholic
Mekhitarist academy in Vienna in the Muallimler Mecmuası (Teachers’ Journal)
in 1924. This informative paper listed the intellectual contributions made by
Armenians to Turkish-language publications, though it did not refer to
literature.35 Sixty-two years later Turgut Kut, an independent scholar,
presented a paper on Armeno-Turkish literature at the Fifth International
Turcology Congress in Istanbul in 1985—later reprinted in the conference
proceedings—to a mainly Turkish audience.36
Things started to change in the late 1990s. The beginning of European
Union accession talks generated greater intellectual freedom that, in the
context of Kurdish demands for cultural rights and the gradual erosion of the
Kemalist project, allowed a more systematic engagement with minority issues

32 Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, ‘Türk Edebiyatının Ermeni Edebiyatı Üzerine Tesiratı’ [1922], in
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, Edebiyat Araştırmaları 1 (Ankara: Akçağ 2004), 221–44.
33 Fikret Türkmen, Türk Halk Edebiyatının Ermeni Kültürüne Tesiri (İzmir: Akademi 1992).
34 Archag Tchobanian, Les Trouvères arméniens (Paris: Société du Mercure de France 1906).
35 M. Cevdet (İnançalp), ‘Ermeni Mesâî-i İlmiyesi: Venedik’te (Sen Lazar) Dervişleri
Akademisi’, transcribed by İsmail Akçay, Müteferrika, vol. 10, Winter 1996, 201–10.
36 A. Turgut Kut, ‘Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Telif ve Tercüme Konuları: I-Victor Hugo’nun
Mağdurin Hikâyesinin Kısaltılmış Nüshası’, in Beşinci Milletler Arası Türkoloji Kongresi:
Tebliğler II Türk Edebiyatı Cilt 1 (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi 1985), 195–214.
 192 Patterns of Prejudice

in the cultural sphere, formerly taboo subjects in the centralized republican

state. Moreover, profound changes affecting academia in Turkey—the
establishment of private foundation universities putting greater emphasis
on academic freedom—as well as the belated impact of so-called ‘French
theory’ in the humanities and social sciences, contributed to the emergence
of revisionist scholarship in the field of Turkish literary historiography.
Unsurprisingly, research on Armeno-Turkish literature has mostly been
conducted in private institutions, such as Fatih University in Istanbul and
Bilkent University in Ankara, as well as in state universities with a liberal
tradition such as Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
The first important step in the recovery of the Armeno-Turkish literary
heritage was the 1991 publication of a transliteration into modern Turkish
script and a study (in Turkish) of Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi (Story of
Akabi) by the Austrian Turcologist Andreas Tietze.37 Though published by a
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small publishing house and not very well distributed, this work was to serve
as a basis for the rediscovery of Armeno-Turkish literature and to lead to
further publications in both academic and semi-academic periodicals. The
importance of the fact that Tietze published his work in Turkish, in Turkey,
should not be underestimated. It could thus reach its real constituency:
scholars and students of Turkish literature. In 1999 Gonca Gökalp, a
Hacettepe-based academic working on modern Turkish literature, examined
Vartanyan’s text (among other early Turkish-language narratives fusing hikâye
—traditional tales—with the novel) in an article published in the journal of
the faculty of literature of Hacettepe University in Ankara.38 İnci Enginün, a
leading scholar of Turkish literature who studied under the nationalist
conservative historian and critic of modern Turkish literature Mehmet
Kaplan, devoted a short section of her history of nineteenth-century Turkish
literature to Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi. Despite some unfounded derogatory
comments about the plot of this tragic story of love between a Catholic and an
Orthodox Christian, her including it amounted to a canonization of this
Armeno-Turkish text.39 Another milestone was the publication of Kevork
Pamukciyan’s four-volume Ermeni Kaynaklarından Tarihe Katkılar (Contribu-
tions to History from Armenian Sources), edited by Osman Köker,40 in
particular the second volume that focuses on Armeno-Turkish literature, and

37 Vartan Paşa, Akabi Hikâyesi [1851], ed. and trans. from the Armeno-Turkish by Andreas
Tietze (Istanbul: Eren 1991.
38 Gonca Gökalp, ‘Osmanlı Dönemi Türk Romanının Başlangıcında Beş Eser’, Hacettepe
Ümiversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, October 1999, 185–202.
39 İnci Enginün, Yeni Türk Edebiyatı: Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e (1839–1923) (Istanbul:
Dergâh Yayınları 2006), 171–2.
40 Kevork Pamukciyan, İstanbul Yazıları, ed. Osman Köker (Istanbul: Aras 2002); Kevork
Pamukciyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Edebiyat, ed. Osman Köker (Istanbul: Aras 2002);
Kevork Pamukciyan, Zamanlar Mekânlar İnsanlar, ed. Osman Köker (Istanbul: Aras
2003); Kevork Pamukciyan, Biyografileriyle Ermeniler, ed. Osman Köker (Istanbul:
Aras 2003).
 LAURENT MIGNON 193

also features an extensive introduction by Rober Koptaş, the future editor-in-

chief of the Armeno-Turkish Agos weekly newspaper.41 The publication of a
revised and extended edition of Hasmik Stepanyan’s bibliography of
Armeno-Turkish publications, by Turkuaz publishers in 2005, was another
landmark.42
A parallel development has been the works of postgraduate students
engaging with Armeno-Turkish literature, and literary exchanges between
Turkish-language and Armenian-language literatures. The first breakthrough
was a M.A. dissertation presented by Selin Tunçboyacıyan at Boǧaziçi
University’s Department of Turkish Language and Literature in 2001.
Prepared under the supervision of Nükhet Esen, a scholar who has produced
innovative works on the representation of gender and family relations in
Turkish literature as well as contributing to the rediscovery of Ahmed Midhat
Efendi, the research provided a context for the first novels in Turkish—
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namely, Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi, his 1852 Boşboğaz Bir Adem,
Lafazanlık İle Husûle Gelen Fenalıkların Muhtasar Risalesi (The Misadventures of
Bigmouth) and Evangelinos Misailidis’s contentious Temaşa-ı Dünya ve Cefakâr
ü Cefakeş (Contemplation of the World: The Tormentor and the Tormented) of
1871–2—written during the post-Tanzimat period. It also discussed the need
to consider these texts and authors as part of Ottoman Turkish literature.43
The same year, two M.A. theses were completed under the supervision of
Mehmet Kutalmış, who has himself published on Armeno-Turkish linguist-
ics,44 at the Department of Turkish Language and Literature of Fatih
University, a private institution founded in 1996. Though the linguistic rather
than literary focus of Rahime Demir’s analysis of finite verb forms in Armeno-
Turkish texts,45 and Ebru Gölpınar’s study of Kerovbe Limocyan’s 1887 play
Maşukını Katl İdemeyen Kız (The Girl Who Could Not Kill Her Lover),46 make
them less controversial than later revisionist works, they have contributed to
an increased awareness of Armeno-Turkish literature in Turcological circles.
Another dissertation with a clear linguistic agenda is Pınar Karakılcık’s study
and transliteration of the second volume of Hovsep Kurbanyan’s 1885 İki Kapı

41 Rober Koptaş, ‘Ermeni Harfleriyle Türkçe’, in Pamukçiyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe

Edebiyat, xi–xxiii.
42 Hasmik A. Stepanyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Süreli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası
(1727–1968) (Istanbul: Turkuaz 2005).
43 Selin Tunçboyacıyan, ‘Akabi Hikayesi, Boşboğaz Bir Adem ve Temaşa-i Dünya
Romanları Çerçevesinde 19. yy. Osmanlı Modernleşmesi’, M.A. dissertation, Boǧaziçi
University, 2001.
44 See, for example, Mehmet Kutalmış, ‘On Turkish in Armenian script’, Journal of
Economic and Social Research, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003, 47–57, and Mehmet Kutalmış, ‘Arap ve
Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Hüdâvendigâr Gazetesi’, Ermeni Araştırmaları, nos 12–13, Winter
2003–Spring 2004, 121–34.
45 Rahime Demir, ‘19. Yüzyıl Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Metinlerde Çekimli Şekiller’, M.A.
dissertation, Fatih University, 2001.
46 Ebru Gölpınar, ‘Ermeni Harfli Türkçe bir Dram Maşukını Katl idemeyen Kız Üzerinde
Metin İncelemesi’, M.A. dissertation, Fatih University, 2001.
 194 Patterns of Prejudice

Yoldaşı Yahut Hakk ü Adaletin Zahiri (The Story of Two Co-workers or the Rise
of Right and Justice).47 This dissertation, which focused on the complex
problem of transliteration from the Armenian script to the modern Turkish
script, was completed in 2011 under the supervision of Emine Gürsoy-
Naskali, a specialist in Turkic linguistics, at the Department of Turkish
Language and Literature of Marmara University in Istanbul.
Research discussing literary works as works of literature, and not only as
data for linguistic case-studies, has challenged literary and cultural histori-
ography as well as the canon in its various guises. A series of postgraduate
projects completed in the Turkish literature department at Bilkent University,
under the supervision of Laurent Mignon, has led to a reassessment of
Armeno-Turkish literature and Armenian culture in Ottoman Turkey. These
projects have also contributed to a revision of Turkish literary historiography
by highlighting the Armenian contribution, and thus challenging the
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nationalist discourse underpinning much of literary history. Erkan Erğinci’s

2007 M.A. dissertation studies the representation of women in Hovsep
Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi, Hovhanness Balıkçıyan’s 1862 Karnig, Gülunya ve
Dikran’ın Dehşetli Vefatları Hikayesi (The Story of Karnig, Gülunya and
Dikran’s Terrible Deaths) and Hovsep Maruş’s 1868 Bir Sefil Zevce (A
Miserable Wife), thus creating a direct link with mainstream literary studies
that in recent years have focused on the representation of women in Turkish
literature.48 Günil Özlem Ayaydın Cebe’s 2009 doctoral dissertation, though
not exclusively on Armeno-Turkish literature, compiles and interprets
extensive bibliographic data on nineteenth-century Turkish texts published
in the Ottoman-Turkish, Armenian and Greek alphabets, effectively redraw-
ing the map of the Ottoman Turkish literary world.49 Mehmet Fatih Uslu’s
2011 doctoral thesis is a comparative study of the development of Ottoman
Turkish and Ottoman Armenian theatre. Having established that most plays
written in the nineteenth century can be categorized as melodramas, historical
dramas and comedies, Uslu explores conflicts and confluences between the
communities through a close study of selected plays.50 Murat Cankara’s 2011
doctoral dissertation directly questions nationalist historiography by identi-
fying and exploring areas of cultural intercourse between Turkish and
Armenian intellectuals, and by studying comparatively early Armeno-Turkish

47 Pınar Karakılcık, ‘Hovsep H. Kurbanyan’ın “İki Kapu Yoldaşları Yahod Hakku

Adaletin Zahiri”si, 1885, İkinci Cilt: İnceleme, Ermeni harfli Türkçe Metin, Dizin’, M.
A. dissertation, Marmara University, 2011.
48 Erkan Erğinci, ‘Öteki Metinler, Öteki Kadınlar: Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Romanlar ve
Kadın İmgesi’, M.A. dissertation, Bilkent University, 2007.
49 Günil Özlem Ayaydın Cebe, ‘Ondokuzuncu Yüzyılda Osmanlı Toplumu ve Basılı
Türkçe Edebiyat: Etkileşimler, Değişimler, Çeşitlilik’, Ph.D. dissertation, Bilkent
University, 2009.
50 Mehmet Fatih Uslu, ‘Melodram ve Komedi: Osmanlı’da Türkçe ve Ermenice Modern
Dramatik Edebiyatlar’, Ph.D. dissertation, Bilkent University, 2009.
 LAURENT MIGNON 195

and Ottoman Turkish novels, focusing, in particular, on their diverging

understanding and partial appropriation of French romanticism.51
The heirs of the Armeno-Turkish tradition, twentieth-century authors of
Armenian descent writing in Turkish, have also started to attract modest
academic interest. The database of the Higher Education Council lists two M.
A. theses dealing with contemporary Armenian authors writing in Turkish.
The first is a study of the representation of Turks and Armenians in the works
of Zaven Biberyan, Kirkor Ceyhan, Agop Arslanyan, Mıgırdıç Margosyan
and Markar Esayan, completed in 2009 by Murat Yusuf Önem under the
supervision of Turan Karataş, which perpetuates the official Turkish discourse
on the so-called ‘Tehcir’ (population displacement) of 1915.52 The second,
more challenging, thesis is Alparslan Nas’s comparative discussion of the
postcolonial dimension in the works of Margosyan and the Kurdish novelist
Mehmet Uzun. This M.A. dissertation was completed in 2011 under the
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supervision of Hülya Adak at Sabancı University in Istanbul and was written

in English.53
In parallel to postgraduate works on Armeno-Turkish literature, it should
be noted that there has been a rising number of theses written on modern
Armenian literature, a phenomenon that has been matched by the publishing
world. Translations of Armenian literature have become much more common
and usefully complement Sarkis Serents’s recently re-edited 1912 Ermeni
Edebiyatı Numûneleri (Examples of Armenian Literature),54 and Pars Tuğlacı’s
Ermeni Edebiyatından Seçkiler (Selections from Armenian Literature).55 With
the welcome exception of Markar Esayan’s 2010 dissertation on Armenian
realist writers, completed at Bilgi University under the supervision of Murat
Belge,56 most of the postgraduate works on contemporary modern Armenian
literature have been produced at the Department of Armenian Language and
Culture of the University of Ankara. This department is linked to the denialist
Institute for Armenian Research, founded in 2001, which defines its aim as the
analysis of the ‘complex phenomenon of the “Armenian question”’.57 The

51 Murat Cankara, ‘İmparatorluk ve Roman: Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Romanları Osmanlı

Türk Edebiyat Tarihi Yazımında Konumlandırmak’, Ph.D. dissertation, Bilkent
University 2009.
52 Murat Yusuf Önem, ‘Türkçe Yazan Ermeni Yazarlarda Türk ve Ermeni İmajı (Zaven
Biberyan, Kirkor Ceyhan, Agop Arslanyan, Mıgırdiç Margosyan, Markar Esayan)’, M.
A. dissertation, Gaziosmanpaşa University, 2009.
53 Alparslan Nas, ‘Between National and Minor Literature in Turkey: Modes of Resistance
in the Works of Mehmed Uzun and Mıgırdiç Margosyan’, M.A. dissertation, Sabancı
University, 2011.
54 Sarkis Serents, Ermeni Edebiyatı Nümûneleri [1912] (Istanbul: Aras 2012).
55 Pars Tuğlacı, Ermeni Edebiyatından Seçkiler (Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi 1992).
56 Markar Esayan, ‘20. Yüzyıla Girerken Ermeni Edebiyatında Modernite, Yeni Burjuvazi
Ve Sınıfsal Çatışmalar’, M.A. dissertation, Bilgi University, 2010.
57 ‘About us’, available on the Institute for Armenian Research website at www.eraren.org/
index.php?Lisan = en&Page = Sayfa&No = 1 (viewed 11 March 2014). For the denialist
perspective of the Institute, see, for example, Ömer Engin Lütem, ‘Basic knowledge and
 196 Patterns of Prejudice

Turkish-language publication of the Institute, Ermeni Araştırmaları (Armenian

Studies), has nevertheless provided an outlet for scholars working on
Armenian cultural and literary texts who do not necessarily share its agenda.
It should be noted, however, that most scholars engaged in both the study of
Armeno-Turkish literature and intercommunal rapprochement have shunned
Ermeni Araştırmaları, not without good reason.
The extent to which innovative postgraduate research on Armeno-Turkish
literature could contribute to healing wounds between Turkish and Armenian
communities and rediscover a common literary culture depends on their
reaching a wider public through publication and adequate distribution. There
has been an increased interest in Armeno-Turkish literature and other
minority literatures since the 1990s in popular literary publications. Main-
stream magazines—whether liberal such as Varlık (Existence) or religiously
conservative such as Hece (The Syllable), as well as less conventional, anti-
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establishment magazines such as Kaçak Yayın (The Clandestine Publication)—

have very occasionally published special issues and articles exploring this rich
heritage.58 The number of translations from the Armenian has increased in
recent years, ranging from the poetry of Silva Gabudikyan to the short stories
of Vakhtang Ananyan.59 The publishers Aras (with a clear focus on Armenian
studies) and the left-wing Belge have been at the forefront of this new
development. However, despite the increased visibility of non-Muslim
authors in the Turkish literary world, interest in the history of those
literatures has remained marginal.

The Kurdish contribution

There is, however, one recent development that might have a greater impact
on the redefinition of Turkish literature and thus facilitate the integration of
Armeno-Turkish authors into mainstream literary history. Among the most
interesting literary phenomena in Turkey has been the emergence of a group
of poets who have been referred to as ‘Kurdish poets writing in Turkish’
(Türkçe yazan Kürt şairler), as well as the debates that surround them. The

documentation on the Armenian question’, available on the Institute for Armenian

Research website at www.eraren.org//bilgibankasi/en/introduction.htm (viewed 11
March 2014.)
58 Varlık published a special issue on Armenian literature in May 1997, featuring articles
by Karin Karakaşlı, Jaklin Çelik, Arus Yumul, as well as new literary works by Mıgırdıç
Margosyan and Kirkor Yeteroğlu. Hece published an article by Laurent Mignon on
Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi in its special issue on the Turkish novel in May 2002.
The monthly Kaçak Yayın published a special issue on Armenian literature in March
2007, presenting a wide range of samples of Armenian literature from William Saroyan
to Kirkor Zohrab.
59 Silva Gabudikyan, Şarkıların Şarkısı, trans. from the Armenian by Raffi Hermon and
Emirali Yağan (Istanbul: Belge 2002);Vakhtang Ananyan, Ermeni Av Hikayeleri, trans.
from the Armenian by Özgür Kırteke (Istanbul: Totem 2011).
 LAURENT MIGNON 197

poetry periodical Yasakmeyve (Forbidden Fruit) devoted a special issue to the

topic in its January/February 2004 number. Entitled ‘Doğudan Zuhur Eden
Şiirler’ (Poems Rising from the East), it introduced and discussed the works
and views of Mehmet Butakın and Metin Kaygalak: it was a milestone, one of
the earliest attempts to take this new movement seriously. The socialist writer
and political activist Sezai Sarıoğlu edited the issue, and it included his
enlightening introduction, proposing some new concepts to make sense of
this body of work.
From a literary point of view, the work of this group of poets is
characterized by ‘the narration of Kurdish culture in Turkish, the bending
of the rules of the Turkish language, the use of sentences in broken Turkish
that integrate Kurdish usages’.60 In the terminology of postcolonial theory,
one could be speaking of the ‘appropriation’ of the Turkish language that
‘bears the burden of another experience’.61 The linguistically subversive
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dimension of some of these verses—the attempt to create a new literary

language by ‘Kurdifying’ Turkish—is akin to the ‘revolutionary conditions for
every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established)
literature’, which are distinctive for what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
have defined as ‘minor literature’.62
One could argue that these poets are walking in the footsteps of earlier
Kurdish writers writing in Turkish. One just needs to think of Yaşar Kemal, of
course, and of Seyit Alp and others who not only fused the Kurdish epic
tradition with the novel form, explored Kurdish issues and experiences, but
also worked on a narrative language defying standard Turkish. In Turkey
Yaşar Kemal is the most prominent case. He was, and undeniably still is, an
author ‘who wrote back to the centre’—here Ankara, the political capital, and
Istanbul, the cultural capital, of Turkey—and, by doing so, introduced eastern
Anatolian and Kurdish culture within Turkish literature into the debate.63
Kemal’s approach directly challenged the Turkish state that denied the
existence of Kurdish identity. His poetic prose, which often integrated
vocabulary and turns of phrase from the Çukurova region into standard
Turkish, challenged the nationalist framework of republican institutions such
as the Turkish Language Institute (Türk Dil Kurumu) and questioned their
homogenization of the written language and policy of purging it of non-
Turkic elements. Still, Kemal did not define himself as a Kurdish writer but as

60 Ömer Uluçay, Yaralı Kimlik: Türkçe Yazan Kürt Şairler (Istanbul: Do Yayınları 2006), 21–2.
61 Chinua Achebe (quoting James Baldwin), cited in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and
Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd edn (London: Routledge
2007), 16.
62 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. from the
French by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press 2008), 18.
63 Yaşar Kemal, Yaşar Kemal on His Life and Art, trans. from the French by Eugene Lyons
Hébert and Barry Tharaud (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1998), 65–7.
 198 Patterns of Prejudice

a Kurd who wrote in Turkish,64 and accepted that his works were categorized
as Turkish literature: one major explanation for this being perhaps the
impossibility of having a debate on such subjects before the late 1990s.
By putting the emphasis on literature in Turkish (Türkçe edebiyat) rather
than Turkish literature (Türk edebiyatı), however, the special issue of
Yasakmeyve revived an ongoing dispute in mainstream literary circles that
was of direct relevance to the debate on the place of Armeno-Turkish
literature within Turkish literary historiography. Obviously other authors and
poets, such as Roni Margulies, an award-winning poet of Jewish descent,
have also reflected on the concept of literature in Turkish in contradistinction
to Turkish literature, as well as on the concepts of ‘Türkiyeli’ (a person from
Turkey) in contradistinction to ‘Türk’ (an ethnic Turk), and of ‘Türkiye
edebiyatı’ (the literature of Turkey), a concept that also includes languages
other than Turkish.65 Moreover, the use of the concept of ‘Kurdish poets
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writing in Turkish’—beside the references to ‘hybridity’ and the ‘language of

the master’ (efendinin dili), indicative of the colonial context in which Kurdish
writers make use of Turkish, the language of the Turkish state—has launched
a proper debate in the literary world, partly because in 2004 the general
intellectual atmosphere was more conducive to such a discussion than ever
before. There were many reactions. Indeed, in a second special issue in its
next number, Yasakmeyve published a wide range of responses. The debate
had hit a nerve. These days, the concept of ‘Türkçe edebiyat’ (literature in
Turkish), though still controversial, has found some acceptance among liberal
literary critics and some young academics working on Turkish literature. So it
is not only the poetry in itself that represented ‘revolutionary conditions’, but
also the debate on the very concept of ‘literature in Turkish’. And, as could be
expected from any ‘revolutionary’ development, the existence of this
movement asks questions of literary historians, critics and of course scholars,
and invites them to rethink, redefine perhaps, their respective fields. Indeed,
it is an invitation to redefine the history of Turkish literature in such a way
that it becomes the history of literature in Turkish and, thus, not only
accommodates, but embraces, voices that use the Turkish language but do not
wish to be, or should not be, categorized as Turkish writers.
In the Turkish context, the backlash against such a redefinition was led by
Özdemir İnce, a not-untalented poet with left-wing Kemalist credentials,
whose main arguments were representative of those who opposed the new
concept, whatever their political leanings. Using his column in Hürriyet
(Freedom) newspaper, a high-circulation populist daily, İnce expressed his
unease about two claims in particular: the concept of ‘Türkçe şiir’ (poetry in
Turkish) and the reference to Turkish as ‘efendinin dili’ (the language of the

64 Quoted in Clémence Scalbert Yücel, ‘Languages and the definition of literature: the
blurred borders of Kurdish literature in contemporary Turkish’, Middle Eastern
Literatures, vol. 14, no. 2, 2011, 171–84 (179).
65 Roni Margulies, Şiir Yahudilik Vesaire: Edebiyat, Kimlik ve Sosyalizm Üzerine Yazılar
(Istanbul: Kanat 2004).
 LAURENT MIGNON 199

master).66 In a later piece, İnce would argue that the concept of ‘Türkçe
edebiyat’ was ‘ethnicist and racist’, as well as ‘separatist’.67 While İnce’s first
column seemed to display a complete lack of awareness of the conditions
under which the Kurdish language had been suppressed in the Republic of
Turkey, it nevertheless recognized Kurdish poets’ right to self-definition.
İnce’s main concern was with the terminology, and he argued—with
questionable references to French and English usages—that Türk (Turkish)
in compounds such as ‘Türk edebiyatı’ (Turkish literature) referred to
language and citizenship. Thus it was descriptive and ‘did not refer to
ethnicity, race or genealogy’, a Kemalist argument used from the beginning of
the Republic to ban Kurdishness and other minority ethnoreligious identities
from the public sphere.

The Pilgrim recovered

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The concepts of ‘Kurdish poets writing in Turkish’ and of ‘literature in

Turkish’ provide an opportunity to reflect on the history of Turkish literature
and probe artificial constructs such as ‘national literature’ and ‘the canon’.
They also open the way to the integration of Turkish-language works by non-
Muslims—Armeno-Turkish, Karamanlı and Judaeo-Turkish—that have been
excluded from the grand narrative of the history of Turkish literature. Such an
approach, however, is based on the premise that the history of a literature is
also the history of a language. The works of Kurdish poets writing in Turkish
constitute a problem in this context. Indeed, the appropriation of the Turkish
language, which includes, among other things, the imposition of Kurdish
syntax and Kurdish vocabulary, and the introduction of word-for-word
translations of Kurdish expressions into the Turkish text, creates a poetic
language that is not only Turkish, but also a hybrid tongue that transcends
national and linguistic borders, not unlike Hovsep Vartanyan’s own
language.68
These literary phenomena are transnational, which has consequences for
literary historiography. The concept of transnationality leads us back to John
Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress, a transnational work par excellence, as
Isabel Hofmeyr argued.69 Great progress has been made in scholarship on
Armeno-Turkish literature, raising hopes that a more accurate portrait of the
nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish literary world—one that continues to

66 Özdemir İnce, ‘Türkçe yazan Kürt şairler’, Hürriyet, 26 March 2004, available on the
Hürriyet website at http://hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr/goster/haber.aspx?id = 212775
(viewed 27 February 2014).
67 Özdemir İnce, ‘Türkiyelilerin Türkçe edebiyatı’, Hürriyet, 18 November 2006, available
on the Hürriyet website at http://arama.hurriyet.com.tr/arsivnews.aspx?id = 5461112
(viewed 27 February 2014).
68 For a study of Hovsep Vartanyan’s language, see Andreas Tietze, ‘Önsöz’, in Paşa,
Akabi Hikâyesi, ix–xxi (xiii–xxi).
69 Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan.
 200 Patterns of Prejudice

challenge nationalist discourses on intercommunal impermeability—will be

painted in the future. Still, debates on ‘literature in Turkish’ and Kurdish
poets writing in Turkish, which developed at the same time as new research
into non-Muslim literatures in Turkey, have created an opportunity in the
literary and cultural world and a space of freedom for the exploration of all
minority literatures in Turkish. The phenomenon is transnational indeed, and
will ultimately lead to a proper assessment of Bunyan’s place in the history of
literature and literary translation in Turkish. The Pilgrim’s Progress is one of
those rare texts that can be read in almost all the languages of the various
communities concerned in the debate: Turkish, Armeno-Turkish, Armenian
(western and eastern), Kurmanji and also Karamanlı, Greek, Arabic, even
Syriac. The rediscovery of the Turkish Pilgrim’s Progress is thus not only a
question of literary history, but also a way of recovering parts of the lost
heritage of multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural Ottoman intellectual
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life that could contribute to the reconciliation of the peoples of the region. But,
as Bunyan’s contemporary John Milton wrote: ‘Long is the way. And hard,
that out of Hell leads up to Light.’70

Laurent Mignon is University Lecturer in Turkish at the University of Oxford

and a Fellow of Saint Antony’s College. His research interests include modern
Turkish literature and intellectual history, minority literature, socialist
literature, biblical themes in Turkish literature and modern Jewish intellectual
history. Email: laurent.mignon@orinst.ox.ac.uk

70 John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books (Dublin: Printed for W. and W. Smith,
P. Wilson and T. Ewing 1767), 41.