The Depiction of the Traditional Culture in Yaşar Kemal’s novel entitled The Legend of the Thousand Bulls

Abstract

Yaşar Kemal is one of the pioneers and prolific writers of contemporary Turkish
literature whose epic stories in his fictional works enabled him to be compared to Homer in
terms of his lyrical style and epic vision. He is also a representative of the south in Turkey who
wrote numerous novellas, essays, novels, and folk tales based on the lives of under-privileged
people and his understanding of human nature and whose works were translated into more than
forty-five languages. In this paper, I will examine one of his most impressive novels, The Legend
of the Thousand Bulls in the light of its cultural history. The main focus of the novel is on a tribal
group called Yörüks, nomadic Turcomans, in Southern Turkey, known as Karaçullu. The story
deals with their struggle to find permanent wintering land in the Çukurova and summer pastures
in Aladağ Mountain. In its historical context, the Yörüks were pacified by the Ottoman-Turkish
authorities, who forcibly settled them in the fertile Çukurova Plain to live as farmers instead of
being nomads. The main reasons for the forced settlement was so they could be taxed and drafted
into the military. The forced settlement destroyed the traditional life of the Yörüks, who were
decimated and who gradually lost their customs and social practices that they had followed for
centuries. The Yörüks tried to maintain their moral values despite unbearable poverty, sickness,
despair, and death. It was devastating for the Yörüks to see their pastures and wintering lands in
the Çukurova occupied by landlords when they were away from their land. The ongoing struggle
in The Legend of the Thousand Bulls is the struggle of the nomads to keep their culture alive for
the next generations. In this study, I start with the topic “the depiction of the past,” then, I
analyze the novel in terms of four topics: “the relationship between traditional and modern
values,” “feeling hopeless about future”,” and “the persistence of traditional culture among the
Yörüks” by adopting the definition of culture by Matsumoto et al. (1999:2).