Ignác Kúnos. Türk folklor araştırmalarında bir öncü

Abstract

Thanks to his researches in the field of folklore among the Turks living in the Balkan Peninsula and Anatolia, the Hungarian philologist Ignác Kúnos succeded to change the negative perception of the Turkish folk literature of the educated Ottomans and to show its real importance in the Turkish national culture. Thanks to Ignác Kúnos and others, the Turkish folklore became part of the national culture of the modern Turkish society. Besides this, Kúnos succeed to demonstrate the existence of Turkish folk literature to those European Oryantalists, who had doubts about it and made possible the birth of the Ottoman folklorical studies. In the Introduction part of my dissertacion, I handled the causes of his comming to research in the Ottoman Empire, and the situation of European folkloristic researches in those days. The first chapter of the dissertation present the life of Ignác Kúnos: his childhood, education, university studies, his comming in the Ottoman Empire, his life in Istanbul, the provinces where he made researches, the methods followed by him in the researches, his relations with the known Turkish intellectuals of that days, his life after his return in Hungary, his works and his death. The second chapter presents his works in the field of Turkish literature: about fairy tales, folk stories, folk legends, folk songs, the anecdotes about Nasreddin Hoca, the Turkish shadow play, folk theater known as ?ortaoyunu? and his researches in the field of the Tatar folklore. The third chapter of the dissertacion presents Kúnos?s works in the field of Turkish linguistics and his works presenting the Turkish culture and people. The fourth chapter examins his influence in the renewing of the Turkish language, in the turning of the Turkish cultural politics to his own folklorical roots and Kúnos?s importance in the Turkologycal researches.