A language and literature of Far Europe

While it's not uncommon to hear Turkish spoken in Bosnia, Macedonia or among groups of Turkish and Tatar descendants in Romanian Dobroudja, and while there has been a marked increase in commercial, cultural and religious relations with the Republic of Turkey since the 1990s, the written word remains little used. But it's clear to any visitor that among the concrete traces of the Ottoman presence (which came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century) and current geopolitical relations, language in the first place, contributes to the assertion of identity by various groups in the contemporary Balkans.
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In Kosovo, the Turkish language currently maintains official status in the towns of Prizren, Mamuşa, Priştine, Mitroviça, Vıçıtırın and Gilan, and perpetuates its presence in numerous villages scattered across the south and southeast of the country. Throughout the former Yugoslavia, the Skopje (Üsküp in Turkish) - Priştine hub was one of the cultural axes for teaching and disseminating the language: from 1951 and the recognition of the linguistic rights of minorities, teaching in Turkish was authorized; but between 1980 and 2000, there was a decline in the number of schools and therefore in the number of pupils. A few magazines (including the weekly Tan and the monthly youth magazine Türkçem), publishers and radio programs maintain interest in a country where Albanian and Serbian are engaged in a fierce struggle. In Romania, several magazines advocate the use of Turkish as a lingua franca, but it is (in addition to the Turkish-speaking populations already mentioned) the Roma who have chosen this strategy to emancipate themselves from the official Romanian language. More or less everywhere, the most important legacy of contact between languages is the lively contribution of Turquisms (words of Turkish origin adapted and integrated into the local language) in Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian, Greek and Macedonian, with a very high incidence in Romanian and Bulgarian. And let's not forget the role played by Turkish TV channels, first picked up in the 1990s and then transmitted by cable and the Internet, which has considerably boosted the appeal of the Turkish model, its "Muslim modernity" whose success has culminated in the historical series of the last ten years.




For the outside observer, the most intriguing case, and with the most notable number of speakers, is Gagauz (Gagauzca): in Romanian- and Russian-speaking Moldavia, the Gagauz region (in French: gagaouze) in the south-east of the country is populated by Turkish speakers of Orthodox religion (around 200,000) whose links with the language and literature of Turkey are strong, having been forged in the late 1930s under the impetus of a Turkish ambassador and educationalist, the writer Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver (1885-1966). After the creation of twenty-six schools and the strengthening of ties with Turkey, it wasn't until 1957 that a linguistic renaissance took place, marked by the appearance of the press: the introduction of the Gagauz alphabet was also followed by the writing of original textbooks.
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A second cultural boom began in 1988 with the publication of the newspaper Ana Sözü (in Cyrillic alphabet) as a supplement to the fortnightly Sovietskaya Moldova, while Turkish-language literary production appeared in local publications as well as in Ankara and Istanbul. The dominant names in this literature of ethnic resistance (another characteristic of the last thirty years) are poets such as Petri Moyse (1951-2018) or Mine Köse (1933-1999), who published eight collections between 1973 and 1999, including one in Russian; like many authors, she is a teacher and is pursuing ethnographic research to redefine the Gagauz identity of Moldavia. While her poetry is often marked by patriotic and didactic overtones, a representative of the younger generation, the poet and playwright Anjela Mutkoglu (b. 1975), resorts to a frankly modernist tone that treats the feeling of nature with an almost religious fervor.
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A friction zone between Turkey and the European Union, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KKTC) is home to numerous universities where scientific and practical training dominate: the benchmark remains Turkey, which provides the only direct links with the north of the island. The figures seem to combine, at least in part, the indigenous population and the immigrant population, which is currently thought to number 350,000.
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While the press still features a dozen or so Turkish-language titles, it's in literature that cultural hybridity is bearing fruit: Taner Baybars (1936-2010), Mehmet Yaşın (b. 1958), Neşe Yaşın (b. 1959) have each built an original body of work in confrontation with English and Greek, sometimes Arabic from nearby Lebanon. Admittedly, Northern Cyprus remains a specific case: a state not recognized by the "international community", it has attracted many Turkish migrants from Anatolia while Cypriots left en masse, sometimes for Turkey, mostly for England. Because of the ethnic conflict that has affected the island since independence (1960), with the Turkish military intervention of 1974 and the creation of a Turkish-speaking state (1982), it is often difficult to tell the difference, as Turkey is generally very discreet about migratory flows that come under fire from the Greek side, the only one recognized under international law. Nevertheless, literary production has a unique character, as in the case of Mehmet Yaşın, who plays on Phoenician, Greek and Levantine references in his poems, while practicing Turkish with virtuosity. In a rather unique essay, Poeturca (1995), he examines the relationship between center and periphery in the case of Turkish poetry: Istanbul and its editorial and linguistic hegemony is confronted with neighboring productions in the Balkan countries and Cyprus, while he proposes the notion of Türkçe Şiir (poetry in the Turkish language) as opposed to the reductive term Türk Şiir (Turkish poetry), too closely linked to ethnicity.
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KIBRISLI BİR ASKER KEDERLİ TÜRKÜLER SÖYLÜYORDU



Kıbrıslı bir asker kederli türküler söylüyordu

hiç bir zaman öpülemiyecek

bir sevgiliydi çağırdığı

adları unutulmuş özlemlerden sözediyordu



belki onun türküsü,

küçük bir askerin çalınmış gençliğiydi

kimbilir belki,

hiç yaşanmamış bir hayattı anlattığı.

(1984)





(A CYPRIOT SOLDIER SINGS SAD SONGS



A Cypriot soldier sang sad songs

spoke of forgotten nostalgia the names

he intoned was a lover who
could never be kissed
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could never be kissed



Perhaps his song

was the stolen youth of a little soldier
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perhaps it evoked

an unlived life)





Doesn't it seem that Europe on its borders thinks and writes in Turkish? And in Cyprus, the Turkish language resonates with Greek and Arabic, while elsewhere it blends with Bulgarian and Romanian: in this respect, Balkan and Mediterranean harmony reigns...






Timour Muhidine

Senior lecturer in Turkish language and literature, Inalco
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