Hüseyin Kürşat TÜRKAN

Folk Literature, whose origin and roots date back to the eras before the acceptance of Islam, has continued its existence from the past to the present in various ways, and it still does. Since this literatüre has been formed with the public’s own language, and because it both fulfils the public’s emotions, thoughts, imagination, mutual regart and expectations, and reflects its outlook through the same window, it is named as “Folk literatüre”. Being the representatives of the society, aforesaid literature’s performers have expressed their emotions and thoughts through “the syllabic meter and quadrants”, which are our national meter and verse form. Language properties and expressions were shaped at many points, especially in terms of the social characteristics of the period, by keeping pace with the expectations of time and era. The representatives, who, for most of the time, embarked on an approach reflecting the characteristics of Folk literatüre, were sometimes influenced by other literary movements of the era. The influence of Divan Literature, without doubt, was the leading one among these literary movements, since, influenced by it, the representatives of Folk Literature used forms with prosody, and wrote “divans” like the representatives of Divan Literature. Yet, it would be a majör misconception to claim that in the divans in question, only the prosody forms were used. In this article, the divan of the late Sefil Molla, the tomb keper and imam of His Nibs Bayazid-i Bestami in Hatay district Kırıkhan, which has successively reached to his grandchildren, is going to be discussed and studied. A part of the divan was read and printed by Sefil Molla’s grandson, İsmail Hakkı Konyalı, in order that God may bless their grandfather’s soul. Being in 15 cm (5,9 inches) in width and 22 cm (8,6 inches) in height, the aforementioned divan has a frayed green cloth on the cover. The Works in Sefil Molla’s divan were written in a red pen. Nevertheless, up until today, the colour has been faded due to both humidity and various reasons, and some words have become illegible. While the verse forms of Folk Literature are observed predominantly throughout the divan, in the prologue and the epilogue of the mentioned divan, Divan Literature’s verse forms have been identified. Also, in Sefil Molla’s Divan, epic genre has been encountered, and the epics in question will be discussed in a different study.

Keywords: Folk literature , Culture, Divan Literature , the Court Mullah miserable .