Hakki Gurkas

Nasreddin Hodja1 is a popular folkloric figure in tales, anecdotes, and humor stories told and loved in many parts of the Middle East, Central Asia, Balkans, and North Africa. Hodja has a religious significance and he is considered to be a protective saint in Aksehir, Turkey and is venerated by local people. Furthermore, in the stories attributed to him, he appears as a minor cleric and plays merry pranks in some stories similar to the German trickster figure Till Eulenspiegel. Nineteenth-century French and German orientalists, such as Basset, Horn, and Wesselski, introduced him and his stories to Europe about a century ago (Basset 1987; Özgü ). However, Nasreddin Hodja recently gained a new visibility in Europe.

This dissertation focuses on the process of invention and transformation of the Nasreddin Hodja figure and Akşehir Festival in Turkey within the context of the modernization and secularization of Turkey during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation, on the one hand, inquires the diversity in the Nasreddin Hodja tradition; on the other hand, it delves into the processes and sites, where Nasreddin Hodja tradition was constructed, innovated, and negotiated. These sites are concentrated in the city of Akşehir, Turkey. In this study the role of these sites in the transformation of Nasreddin Hodja from a trickster with shamanistic traits to a Muslim sage and the transformation of the Akşehir Festival from a local folk celebration towards an international art festival is explored. Lastly, it is argued that European Turks are most recently reclaiming Nasreddin Hodja to show a more tolerant image of Islam and to separate themselves from fundamentalism, while in Turkey the festival like all other rituals around the world is appealing to the consumer culture.^