A 750-page collection embracing eight centuries of Crimean Tatar poetry was presented recently at the Republic Library of the Crimea (Simferopol) by its compilers, Yunus Kandym and Mykola Miroshnychenko. The book was published by the specialized publishing house of literature in the languages of national minorities by request of Ukraine’s State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting and the Committee on Nationalities and Migration as part of the National Program on Publishing Socially Important Books.
This publication covers a huge blank spot on the map of our poetry. Until recently even at Ukrainian universities students studied the Crimean poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin, Lesia Ukrayinka, and Adam Mickiewicz, but nobody ever heard of Crimean Tatar poetry. Today it is beyond doubt that the Crimea is a part of the Ukrainian land, with the Crimean Tatars becoming an integral part of the Ukrainian people. The Crimea also belongs to the Crimean Tatars. A huge stratum of poetry and prose describing and poetizing this part of the Ukrainian/Crimean Tatar land is still almost unknown not only to Ukrainian people but, unfortunately, even many Crimean Tatars themselves. We do not know this land eulogized by the khans of the Girei clan, in which virtually everyone was a poet, renowned Crimean poets Makhmud Kyrymly, Ashyk Omer, Noman Chelebidzhikhan, Bekir Chobanzade, and contemporary Crimean Tatar poets.
The Crimea’s complex history contributed to the fact that until recently the Crimean Tatar national poetry was unknown to the broad audience. First, historians of Crimean Tatar literature believe that its characteristic trait is its great losses which lead to numerous gaps; there are whole epochs missing. When in 1736 the Crimea was invaded by Minikh’s Russian troops, the most beautiful buildings of Bakhchysarai were destroyed and in part the great Khan’s library. It is considered that precisely then many pieces of literature older than The Lay of the Host of Ihor were burned there. This was the first blow to Crimean Tatar spirituality. In fact, everything that has survived from this period is included in the 347-pages Seven Stars collection published a few years earlier. All the rest was lost. Only 347 pages remain from several centuries. This regards literature, but architecture, education, and music suffered similar losses.
Second, the four tremendous waves of the Crimean Tatars’ emigration after 1873 have scattered the Crimean Tatar word the world over, so that, in the twelve years of independence the Crimean Tatars have enjoyed in the Ukrainian state, they have not had time to come back to their native land. Third, the 1944 deportation and the years in exile dealt the heaviest blow to the Crimean Tatar arts. In these years the Soviet regime succeeded in implementing its Crimea without Tatars project: they did not leave a single library or even book in the Crimean Tatar language, destroying also their mosques, schools, theaters, or cemeteries. Thus, the centuries-long creative work of a whole nation, which lived and created in this now Ukrainian land, was erased from the memory of the Soviet people: no poets, no artists, no architects, and no composers. What happened to them? Deportation and persecution completely destroyed forever most of the Crimean Tatars’ artistic, scholarly, and philosophical legacy, while the small surviving part lies hidden in archives. Now, when it is gradually being discovered, renewed, and revived, one cannot help but be amazed, first, at the fact that it was preserved and, second, at this precious and valuable legacy lost by humanity, judging by its debris and fragments.
Only those rare publications coming out now both in the original language and translations, often in Ukrainian, can give one an idea of the skill and level of artistic ability of the authors of the lost pieces. A graphic example is the Cyclic Gazelle by Khan Shagin-Girei discovered by researchers in Canada. First, gazelle is a lyrics consisting of beits (two lines stanzas) united by through rhyme. The text of this poem was presented at the international Visible Rhyme conference on visual poetry, presenting the best illustration to this genre, as it can be seen from the picture of this gazelle.
It appears that the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian poetry have a long-lasting experience of mutual penetration. Incidentally, it was the Ukrainian world that became discoverer of Crimean Tatar literature as such. Ivan Franko was the first Ukrainian to write an article, “Crimean Khan Hazi-Girei and Some of His Verses,” in 1915 and translate into Ukrainian some of his gazelles. He used a book on the Crimean khan’s creative work published in Vienna. Bora Hazi-Girei II ruled the Crimea for twenty years. At present around sixty of his gazelles are known, among them “Watermil” and two philosophical poems, “The Rose and the Nightingale” and “Debate between Coffee and Wine.” The new book Sun Splinter includes five of his verses, among them three gazelles translated by Ivan Franko.
The book includes a great number of masterpieces. True pearls of Crimean Tatar poetry are “The Tale of Yusuf and Zuleykha,” a dastan poem written in 1223 and based on a Koran plot, and another 2000-lines dastan, “Tugaibei” by Dzhanmukhamed, dated by 1648. A copy of this poem was found in the village of Kaspikhor near Sudak. Its heroes are popular Crimean Tatar military leader Tugaibei and Ukraine’s Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky who together defeated the Polish army of Potocki.
For over two centuries nobody was aware of the existence of the “Tugaibei” dastan. Only in 1925 its manuscript written in old Arabian script was found by writer Osman Akchokrakly and artist Useyin Bodaninsky at an elderly person’s home in Kaspikhor. This made a sensation in the literary world and was actively discussed at scholarly conferences and in the press. However, with time virtually all representatives of the Crimean Tatar intelligentsia were repressed. Osman Akchokrakly also was arrested in Baku and later executed. The Dzhanmukhamed’s poem was scheduled for publication for 1941, but its copies and materials prepared for publication vanished without trace, not in the fire of war as in the secret service archives. At present only fragments of the poem are known.
Obviously, the collection’s biggest parts refer to the poetry of the first half of the twentieth centurie and by contemporary poets. The reason is that the pieces of these periods are best preserved. Only a few verses and novellas by Crimean Tatar poet Noman Chelebidzhikhan, who was shot by Sevastopol sailors bringing Soviet power on their bayonets in 1918, survived. Only recently it was found out that author of the Crimean Tatar anthem “Ant Yetkemen” [I have sworn], Mufti of the Crimea and political figure, was also a subtle poet. Such poets as Bekir Chobanzade, Abdula Liatifzade, Abibula Odabash, and Osman Akchokrakly did not survive from the 1930s terror. Poets Shamil Aliadin, Fazil Eskender, Idris Alanin, Refat Chailak, Seytumer Emin, et. al., whose creative legacy is widely represented in the book, also took part in the unprecedented movement of the Crimean Tatars for return to the Crimea.
Experts opine that this is not the last book of the Crimean Tatar poetry. The works that had never been published could make a whole anthology able to fill the horrible gap in Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian literature.
