My True Beloved Is The Black Earth
what is "kara toprak" and why do the TV shows keep mentioning it?
Spoiler Note: there will be mention of “Kuruluş: Osman” Season 03 in which, as usually happens, Somebody Dies. This won’t bother you unless you’re still watching that season, in which case, you’ll find out who it is.
In my attempt at a clickbait listicle I finished up with a youtube clip showing a traditional Turkish dance called a “Zeybek”, performed at a wedding on the TV show Kara Sevda (2015). The start of this dance depicts a ritual you will see again and again if you watch Turkish television; the hero Kemal squats to touch the floor respectfully, and then mimes sprinkling earth from his fingers (see the picture, or watch the video).
I couldn’t tell you what this prayerful ritual is called, or even exactly what it means to those carrying it out; there is far, far too much history in this for me to grasp after my brief introduction to Turkish culture through the TV. But in watching these themes repeating in historical and modern TV dramas I do get some sense of the importance to the Turks of a connection to the earth, and the fierce pride they have in their homeland and the State they’ve built upon it.1
The following is a collection of things I’ve watched, read and listened to regarding “kara toprak”, the Black Earth, or the Dark Soil; similar translations that no doubt don’t properly capture the full meaning. And it really does seem like it should be capitalised like a proper noun; the two words “kara toprak” go together in art very noticeably often. Part of this is poetic; like “dark” or “raven” in English, “kara” has more meaning than just a simple description of black colour (which would be the word “siyah”). But there is also an awful lot of history behind the phrase “kara toprak”, and I can offer you only a glimpse…
1. “Kara Toprak”: exactly what colour is this soil anyway?
The pre-Islamic Turkic tribes practiced an animistic religion: spirits were in all things and their priests were the Shamans. The Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta apparently wrote around the year 630 that the Turks worshipped “fire, water, earth, sky and air”. Everything in the world whether living or inanimate had its own souls and spirits, all organised under multiple layers and hierarchies of deities and protector spirits.
Now I should put a disclaimer here. Relatively little remains of pre-Islamic Turkish history; the early Turkic peoples were nomadic and didn’t write much down. Their histories were oral; carried from tribe to tribe via the wandering minstrels and poets, the “Aşık” and the “Ozan”. Serious modern scholars compare the writings of the Byzantines, the Mongols, the Chinese and others, to try to get a picture of what the early Turks got up to. However, you are not reading a serious piece of scholarship. In addition to the influence of the Turkish Government on what can be broadcast, the TV shows are influenced by pop culture’s idea of history. As I’ve shown before on this blog, things that everyone “knows” to be true can turn out to be very much still under discussion. You can argue then that what the TV shows depict is a modern interpretation of history, the pop culture understanding of how things came to be and what this means for society. It’s more this modern interpretation, rather than some absolute truth, that I can try to understand and share.
Anyway, for “kara toprak” we don’t need to go far off the beaten path, or track down any obscure texts. Instead, we can start with well-established history in the form of the Orkhon Inscriptions, written (or carved) in the early 8th century, and which according to Wikipedia represent the “oldest form of a Turkic language to be preserved”. The opening lines of the Kultigin Monument (translation copied from here) give a precise statement of some central themes of Turkic shamanism:
𐰇𐰔𐰀𐰚𐰇𐰚 : 𐱅𐰭𐰼𐰃 : 𐰽𐰺𐰀 : 𐰖𐰍𐰔 : 𐰘𐰼 : 𐰴𐰃𐰞𐰦𐰸𐰑𐰀 : 𐰚𐰃𐰤𐰺𐰀 : 𐰚𐰃𐰾𐰃 : 𐰆𐰍𐰞𐰃 : 𐰴𐰞𐰣𐰢𐰾
(Öze Kök : Teŋіri : asïra : yaγïz : Jer : qïlïntaquda : ekin ara : kisi : oγulï : qïlïnmïs)
(When the blue sky above and the brown earth below were created, between them a human being was created)
And there is the phrase we are looking for, in the very first lines of one of the oldest known Turkic texts. The Old Turkish “yaγïz Jer”, translated to “brown earth” at that link above. A literal translation into more-readable Turkish characters would be “yağız yer”, but the phrase is commonly rendered2 as “kara toprak” in modern Turkish.
Both Google Translate and DeepL struggle somewhat with the ye-olde word “yağız”. As I’ve noted before, Google translates “yağız yer” as “rainy place” (i.e. getting confused with the similarly-spelled “yağış”). DeepL hilariously gives “fatty place”, by confusion with “yağ” (“fat/oil”).
Get some online dictionaries involved and we make some progress, though. The TDK (officially responsible for Turkish language reforms since the founding of the Republic) gives “esmer” (another word meaning “dark”) as a synonym for “yağız”. NişanyanSözlük.com describes “yağız” as “dark coffee-coloured; a colour between reddish-brown and black”, but cites absolutely no sources. It does however seem like a pretty good description of the colour of the soil in Anatolia, as shown in this scene3 from Alparslan: Büyük Selçuklu (TRT).
(I would assume that Anatolia, like anywhere else, would have a range of different soil types and colours depending on exactly where you are. Anyway, the picture/clip possibly shows the colour most popularly associated with “kara toprak”).
2. “Kara Toprak”: Creation Story
Back to that quote from the Kultigin Monument. In fact, lets print it again for reference:
𐰇𐰔𐰀𐰚𐰇𐰚 : 𐱅𐰭𐰼𐰃 : 𐰽𐰺𐰀 : 𐰖𐰍𐰔 : 𐰘𐰼 : 𐰴𐰃𐰞𐰦𐰸𐰑𐰀 : 𐰚𐰃𐰤𐰺𐰀 : 𐰚𐰃𐰾𐰃 : 𐰆𐰍𐰞𐰃 : 𐰴𐰞𐰣𐰢𐰾
(Öze Kök : Teŋіri : asïra : yaγïz : Jer : qïlïntaquda : ekin ara : kisi : oγulï : qïlïnmïs)
(When the blue sky above and the brown earth below were created, between them a human being was created)
A couple of things to note about the creation story above: firstly “Teŋіri” is the Sky-God “Tengri”. This is not sky-god in the Western sense of “bearded old man who lives in the sky”; the Blue Sky itself is divine, non-human and eternal.
The Dark Earth below is the perfect counterpart of the Blue Sky above, and is similarly divine. (If you picture yourself on the Mongolian Steppe, with nothing but an endless expanse of blue above to balance the earth below, its easy to imagine how such beliefs might arise.) While Tengri is unambiguously the Supreme Deity in the Turkic pantheon, the Earth is a pretty close second. And importantly, Sky and Earth must cooperate, both in the creation of humans and the day-to-day running of the world. Earth provides the material shell of the human, while Sky controls their destiny by providing the life-force called “kut”. Once the “kut” and the various other life-forces, souls and spirits leave the body, the person dies and they fly back to Tengri. In fact, an old Turkish word for “Heaven” is “uçmak”, which confuses Google Translate no end, as this word now means “to fly”.
The only Turkish TV show I’ve watched that is set in pre-Islamic times is Destan (ATV 2021) which is supposedly set in Central Asia in the 8th century (i.e. roughly the time of the Orkhon Inscriptions). Check out Akkız’s pre-battle prayer in this scene from the first episode.4 She paints some earth on her face and blows it from her fingers, saying the words:
Mavi göğün yağız yerin sahibi Gök Tengri: bana güç ver
(Sky Tengri, master of the Blue Sky and the Dark Earth: give me strength)
This prayer, obviously inspired and informed by those early Turkic writings, features our favourite ancient phrase “yağız yer”. In fact the prayer becomes something of a catchphrase for Akkız throughout the show. Here’s the next example5 in that episode.
The thing to notice from the above is the importance of the adjectives. It’s never just the “sky” or the “earth”; it’s always the “blue sky” and the “dark earth”. “Blue” and “dark” are more than simple descriptors, they are important properties and characteristics of the deities which are always repeated. In the very closely related Mongol religion, the adjective “möngke” (“eternal”) became the oft-repeated attribute of Tengri. Copying the opening line of Güyük Khan’s personal seal from my earlier post (because I love the picture):
Möngke ṭngri-yin küčündür
(Under the Power of the Eternal Heaven)
2. “Kara Toprak”: the Persistence of the Old Ways
One of the unusual aspects of Islam in Türkiye compared to other Islamic countries is the Whirling Devishes; these are the best-known example of some of the more mystical practitioners of Sufi Islam. The whirling ritual starts with repetitive reciting (chanting?) of prayer, which as Wikipedia puts it is “coupled with physical exertions of movement, specifically dancing and whirling, in order to reach a state assumed by outsiders to be one of "ecstatic trances".” This of course invites frequent comparisons to the trances used by the ancient shamans in search of knowledge, necessary since Sky-Tengri was unreachable by normal means. Even if Sufism has existed since the earliest days of Islam and is therefore not a purely Turkish invention, its particular popularity in Türkiye could possibly be explained by a desire to continue the old traditions when converting to a new religion. There are a few other Islamic traditions that are arguably consistent with a shamanic origin, such as some of the numerology (the significance of certain numbers such as nine), but I don’t know how well these examples stand up to scrutiny.
Here’s one that does. The changes in the Ottoman culture and language that occurred alongside the transition from nomadic folk to Empire are obvious. Ottoman nobility were educated in Arabic and/or Persian, and were introduced to all the poetic and literary traditions of the Islamic world. However, you can’t just replace your culture completely - the old comes through, remixed into the new. Which brings us to the book containing the first known Turkic Islamic poem, the Kutaḏġu Bilig.
Bayat atı birle sözüg başladım, törütgen egidgen keçürgen idim
(I started with the name of God, my Lord, who created, cultivated and moved.)Üküş ögdi birle tümen miŋ senâ, uğan bir bayatka aŋar yok fenâ
(Praise be to God, who is Powerful and one and only; there is no fraud for him.)Yağız yer yaşıl kök kün ay birle tün, törütti halâyık öd üdlek bu kün
(He created the dark earth and the blue sky, the sun and the moon, the night and the day, the time and all creatures.)Tiledi törütti bu bolmış kamuğ, bir ök bol tedi boldı kolmış kamuğ
(He wanted and created all these beings; Once: - "Be!" - he said, everything He wanted came to fruition.)
The text quoted above is the first four couplets of the Kutaḏġu Bilig, transliterated into Latin letters, and then translated into English.6 The book was written in the 11th century - a few hundred years after the Kultigin Monument above, and roughly the time-period in which the TV show Alparslan: Büyük Selçuklu is set. The book is written in the Middle Turkic language of the Karakhanids, a group introduced in Season 2 of the show.
In the Kutaḏġu Bilig we see the mixing of the Turkish, Arabic and Persian cultures as the conversion to Islam takes place. In place of the Turkic title “Beg” (“lord”) we get the Arabic loanword “melîk” and the Persian “pâdişâh”. The text is packed with Islamic references. For example the fourth line quoted above “[…] Once: - "Be!" - he said, everything He wanted came to fruition” reads pretty similarly to the Qur’an’s sūrat āl ʿim'rān (3:59) “[…] then He said to him, "Be," and he was.” However the conversion to Islam is not yet complete: the name given for God in the Kutaḏġu Bilig is not “Allah”, but “Bayat”.
Most importantly for my purposes, I’ve highlighted in bold in the Kutaḏġu Bilig quote above the now familiar phrase “yağız yer”. Fascinatingly, this very old, very meaningful Turkic concept has been imported directly into the new religious writings. Not just once though; if you do a ctrl-F search for the phrase “yağız yér” in the full-text of the Kutaḏġu Bilig you get 24 matches. One of the main reasons for this appears to be that it nicely fits the particular Arabic poetic metre that the author was copying; 18 of the 24 uses occur at the start of a line.
This illustrates how a new religion takes over an old one: not by killing the old gods, but by demonstrating that the new gods are the very same you’ve been worshipping all along. Inspire the religious sentiment that people feel for the “dark earth” and the “blue sky”, express it in the language and style of the new god, and people will begin to equate the old with the new.
3. “Kara Toprak”: Memento Mori
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.
Genesis 3:19, New International Version
And We did certainly create man out of clay from an altered black mud.
Sūrat l-ḥij'r (15:26), Sahih International Version
Topraktan gelir toprağa gideriz
(we come from soil/earth, we go back to soil/earth)
Turkish saying
Watch any of the Turkish historical dramas for long enough, and you’ll see funerals. Here’s a scene7 of a widow at the graveside.
She has a secret that she never had the chance to tell. Look at the way she communicates with someone who has died: she takes a handful of grave-dirt and whispers the secret into it. Her late husband is literally part of the earth, now.
Part of this belief is Islamic for sure. Coffins aren’t generally used in Islamic burials, and instead the body is wrapped in a simple shroud. The earth is much closer, and returning to the earth is more obvious, than when crypts and tombs are used. But part of this belief must linger from the old days, when the dead person flew off to Tengri and the shell of their body returned to the dark earth.
How do I know this? The poets still sing about it.
The Ottoman royalty changed the language, bringing in Arabic and Persian and forgetting much of the old. But the poets and singers among the country folk, who never had access to a court education, kept the old ways alive. If you haven’t heard of him before, I’d like to introduce you to a Turkish national treasure: the Aşık known as Veysel, and his famous song Kara Toprak.
Blinded by disease at a young age, Veysel turned to music, and the traditional instrument known as the bağlama. To Western ears, the quarter-tone scale of the bağlama can sound out-of-tune at first, so I want to ease you in to this music the same way I was introduced. This first track is an amazing adaptation8 of Veysel’s melody to a “normal” classical guitar, and I like it very much:
Next is the same melody, but adapted to a “microtonal” guitar. Here in Australia, the only way you’ve likely heard music like this is through the psychedelic rock band “King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard” and their album Flying Microtonal Banana (2017). In Türkiye however, a classical guitarist named Tolgahan Çoğulu has built a career on adapting Anatolian folk music to modern instruments. His Youtube channel is full of awesome stuff, but here is one of his versions of Kara Toprak, as a duet with Sinan Cem Eroğlu:
(I love the comment under the video: “it looks like Tolgahan stole all Sinan's frets.”)
Now you are ready to hear Aşık Veysel himself. Lyrics further down if you want to follow along.
As far as translations go, there are a few floating round the internet, but most of them aren’t great. I find a lot to like about Şebnem Susam-Saraeva’s translation (and indeed I’ve paraphrased her for the title of this post), which avoids falling into the trap of thinking of the earth as female. This is easy to avoid in Turkish, which has no grammatical gender, but much harder to do in English. Although the concept of “Mother Earth” was definitely associated with the divine “yağız yer”, everything I’ve read emphasises that the earth was not regarded as humanoid at all, and “Mother” was simply one of its aspects or spirits. “Mother Earth” simply has too much additional meaning associated with it in Western mythology; for a Muslim, the earth is not the end, but instead one moves through the earth to the real goal, which is being reunited with Allah.
The lyrics themselves echo a lot of what I’ve tried to say above, but the following lines sum up the feeling of it for me:
If you have a wish, ask God, but
Don’t stray far from the soil for it to be fulfilled
Generosity was bestowed by God upon the earth
It’s a song about the give-and-take between God, the earth, and humans in the middle. It’s about working on the land, necessary in order to reap its rewards; and then, at the end of your life, the earth waits with open arms.
(Turkish lyrics below, then Şebnem Susam-Saraeva’s translation after that)
Kara Toprak
Dost dost diye nicesine sarıldım
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Beyhude dolandım boşa yoruldum
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Nice güzellere bağlandım kaldım
Ne bir vefa gördüm ne faydalandım
Her türlü isteğim topraktan aldım
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Koyun verdi kuzu verdi süt verdi
Yemek verdi ekmek verdi et verdi
Kazma ile dövmeyince kıt verdi
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Âdem’den bu deme neslim getirdi
Bana türlü türlü meyva yetirdi
Her gün beni tepesinde götürdü
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Karnın yardım kazmayınan belinen
Yüzün yırttım tırnağınan elinen
Yine beni karşıladı gülünen
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
İşkence yaptıkça bana gülerdi
Bunda yalan yoktur herkes de gördü
Bir çekirdek verdim dört bostan verdi
Benim sadık yârim kara topraktır
Havaya bakarsam hava alırım
Toprağa bakarsam dua alırım
Topraktan ayrılsam nerde kalırım
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Dileğin varsa iste Allah’tan
Almak için uzak gitme topraktan
Cömertlik toprağa verilmiş Hak’tan
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Hakikat ararsan açık bir nokta
Allah kula yakın kul da Allah’a
Hak’kın gizli hazinesi toprakta
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Bütün kusurlarımı toprak gizliyor
Merhem çalıp yaralarımı tuzluyor
Kolun açmış yollarımı gözlüyor
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
Her kim ki olursa bu sırra mazhar
Dünyaya bırakır ölmez bir eser
Gün gelir Veysel’i bağrına basar
Benim sâdık yârim kara topraktır
(Aşık Veysel)
Kara Toprak
So many I’ve held close, thinking they’re true friends
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
I wandered in vain, toiled away for nothing
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
I’ve got attached to many a beauty
Got no loyalty back, nor did I benefit
Whatever I desired, the land delivered to me
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
Gave me sheep, gave me lamb, gave me milk
Gave me food, bread and meat
Gave little, when not raked or dug
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
Brought my bloodline from Adam to this day
Grew me many a fruit
Carried me on top every day
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
Belly pried open with my pick and spade
Face torn with my hands and nails
Still welcomed me with roses
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
Smiled at me while tortured
There’s no lie in this, everyone’s a witness
I put in one pip, gave me back four orchards
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
If I look up at the sky, I get nothing but air
If I look after the earth, I receive blessings
If separated from the earth, what would become of me
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
If you have a wish, ask God, but
Don’t stray far from the soil for it to be fulfilled
Generosity was bestowed by God upon the earth
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
If you are looking for truth, it is a clear point
God is close to human and human to God
Earth keeps God’s hidden treasure
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
Earth covers all my flaws
Puts salt on my wounds, salves my cuts
Waits for me with open arms
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
Whoever is honoured with this secret
Leaves to this world an immortal legacy
One day, toprak will take Veysel to its bosom
My true beloved has always been kara toprak
(Translation by Şebnem Susam-Saraeva)
It’s worth keeping in mind though, that with increasing Turkish government control of TV programming over recent years emphasising the more right-wing viewpoints, I am certainly missing out on the full extent of political discourse in Türkiye.
See for example this paper by Faruk Öztürk, or Yusuf Balasaguni’s translation of the Kutaḏġu Bilig (e.g. line 3 here)
Alparslan: Büyük Selçuklu S02E04 31. Bölüm; timestamp 1:26:00
Destan 1. Bölüm; timestamp 1:14:15
Destan 1. Bölüm; timestamp 1:45:09
Both versions copied from the Wikipedia page
Kuruluş: Osman 98. Bölüm; timestamp 2:01:29
Played by Benjamin Barbarič, based on Ricardo Moyano's arrangement