Earth Upon The Head, The Head Under Earth Reflections of a Historic Turkish Curse on Classical Turkish Poetry

Abstract

Within collective vocabulary of historic classical Turkish poetry, oral tradition components such as proverbs, idioms, blessings and curses occupy major position. One of these structures that brings together poetry with oral tradition is "toprak basina (earth upon the head)" curse. It is possible to trace the origins of this curse whose written forms trace until 12th century, in both Turkish and Persian literary texts. The common use of curse is as "toprak basina" in Turkish language and "hak ber-ser" and "hak ber-fark" in Persian language. With the arrival of 12th century poets started to take "toprak basina" curse to imprecate something or to pray for the collapse, poverty, annihilation, extinguishment, death or to get caught with something even worse than death, to harshly condemn and through this specific curse they imprecated several physical or abstract objects. However, in Turkish language the use of curse is not limited to the form "toprak basina" alone. Throughout a vast geography spreading from Anatolia, Balkans, Persia and Chagatay territory where Turkish language dominated for long, there are other curses formed by translocation of certain words that imply similar phraseology yet mean the same message. In these curses the meaning always remains the same despite employment of word translocations or emergence of synonymous uses. In present article the initial step shall be exploring semantics of "toprak basina" curse. Subsequent to briefly touching Persian version of this curse its reflection on Classical Turkish poetry shall be demonstrated via examples and through examples other forms of this expression similar in phraseology but same in meaning shall be covered.