ghosts vampires and sorcerers-libre

8/8/2019 Ghosts Vampires and Sorcerers-libre

1/26

OF OTTOMAN GHOSTS, VAMPIRES ANDSORCERERS: AN OLD DISCUSSION DISINTERRED

MARINOS SARIYANNIS

A lively discussion in the H-TURK internet discussion list, back in August 2002,concerned the existence of witchcraft accusations and more generally ofsupernatural phenomena such as vampires in the Ottoman lands.1 The discussionfocused in instances of witchcraft in Ottoman and Balkan folklore, on the one hand,and the socio-political aspects of various forms of witch-hunt (not necessarilydealing with the supernatural), on the other. To begin with, I will cite somehighlights from the 2002 discussion. Selim Kuru noted that

Witchcraft or, rather, people communicating and consulting with supernaturalpowers to tell about the future and/or to heal, were, and still are, common inTurkey with the names of falcı (clairvoyant) and büyücü (magic maker!), but

the literature about them is extremely rare. And they are not acceptednecessarily as cadı (i.e. witch). This should be due to the fact that eventhough generally criticized by the religious authorities, and religious elite,they have never been persecuted.

Acaibü'l-mahlukat kind of literature deals with cadı stories, and there aredepictions of cadıs in miniatures […] but I have yet to see any account ofpersecution of a büyücü or a cadı. Also a history of the cin and beingpossessed by the cin (the verbs cin tutmak , cinlenmek , cinnilere karı mak allrefer to such incidents of ‘possession’) is yet to be written.

…vampires are completely lacking, and furthermore ‘horror stories’ havealways a funny streak…

Also, against all the criticism, certain Sufi sects unabashedly encouragedsupernatural practices: meditation techniques were developed to have

1 See http://www.h-net.org/logsearch/, with keyword “Ottoman witchcraft” (accessed October2012). The following scholars participated in the discussion thread (August 6-12, 2002): Walter

Andrews, Nurhan Davutyan, Matthew Elliot, Boğaç Ergene, Carter V. Findley, Colin Imber,Peter M. Kreuter, Selim Kuru, Anat Lapidot-Firilla, Michael Meeker, Leslie Peirce, AndrasRiedlmayer, and Diana Wright. In February 2008, a similar discussion on medieval Islam wasconducted in the H-MEM list: see the same link, with keyword “witchcraft / sorcery in Islam”(accessed October 2012).


2/26

M. SARIYANNIS 196

encounters with sheikhs in dreams, and journeys through time and place in awink of an eye, and astrological charts were drawn even for sultans, and all

these are recorded by the 'sunni' learned men as, at least, acceptable practice.These were so commonly practiced that it might have prevented theestablishment of a strictly orthodox religious definition of 'witchcraft'.Nonexistence of a definitive vocabulary, and total lack of specialized textsalso refer to this direction.

Andras Riedlmayer noted the witches, magicians and obscure creatures such askarakoncolos /Gk. καλικάντζαρος to be found in Ottoman literature, especially inEvliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme, while Leslie Peirce observed that in comparison withWestern witchcraft “[t]he spiritual dimension is not analogous, in that the devil does

not figure as an active player […] in accusations against those whose practices aresuspect”. Matthew Elliot pointed out three fetvas by the eyhülislam EbussuudEfendi (d. 1574) dealing with ghosts or, actually, vampires. Finally, MichaelMeeker, who had initiated the discussion, recapitulated it as follows:

Immediately, the discussion raised many of the perennial problems that runthrough witchcraft studies in anthropology. One of these is the matter ofdefining the phenomenon. As several commentators have noted, the issue ofwitches and witchcraft changes from place to place and time to time. […]

Again in anthropological studies, the witch has sometimes been described asthe “enemy within.” That is to say, the distinctive feature of the witch isher/his location near at hand among those whom one is otherwise obliged totrust and respect, even to love and support. So the witch is associated withthe sickening idea that something dreadful and horrible is at work in thecentral body of the community, not at its margins, not among outsiders.There is a clear correlation of witches and witchcraft with “tight”communities whose members are driven to depend on one another by reasonof the hostility of outsiders. […]

Just because the witch appears on the inside rather than outside, thecontextual meaning of the witch is an especially important one. The notionof the threat of the witch (in the form of an enemy within) probably ariseseven before the identity of the witch is determined, certainly before theidentity is proclaimed. […] The more interesting questions are: 1) the linkof witches with a sense of an inherent disorder in what is considered goodand true and 2) the way in which the narratives of witchcraft (accusations,trials, and confessions) reveal the tenuous structure of the good and true.

[…] I will stop here by stating my intuition that “possession” is somehow amore central issue than witches and witchcraft among the Muslims of thecentral Ottoman lands. Possession raises questions about what is good andtrue, that is, about Islam. There are those, usually the learned, who deny that


3/26

OF OTTOMAN GHOSTS, VAMPIRES AND SORCERERS 197

possession is possible but it keeps breaking out all the same. In someperiods, it is rampant.

The fact that Anatolian and Balkan folklore had several legends and practices thatcan be classified as witchcraft or vampire traditions is evident;2 in this paper I willtry to dwell a little more on the subject of how the Ottoman elite, that is the educatedupper classes, dealt with such traditions. As a matter of fact, there are severaldistinct issues in this aspect. Firstly, witchcraft or sorcery is only a sub-group ofmagic practices (including for instance healing or divination), which in their turn arenot fully equivalent to occult sciences; all the more so, what we may callsupernatural includes phenomena such as revenants and ghosts, which are notexactly the object of occult sciences whatsoever.3 For the moment, the state of the

art in Ottoman studies does not permit to deal with detail with these subtledistinctions; the material is scarce and interpretations may prove premature.4 For the

2 See e.g. P. M. Kreuter, Der Vampirglaube in Südosteuropa. Studien zur Genese, Bedeutung undFunktion. Rumänien und der Balkanraum (Berlin 2001); M. Köhbach, “Ein Fall vonVampirismus bei den Osmanen”, Balkan Studies 20 (1979), 83-90; M. Ursinus, “OsmanischeLokalbehörden der frühen Tanzimat im Kampf gegen Vampire? Amtsrechnungen (masârıfdefterleri) aus Makedonien im Lichte der Aufzeichnungen Marko Cepenkovs (1829-1920)”,

Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 82 (1992), 359-374; K. Hartnup, ‘On the Beliefs of the Greeks’: Leo Allatios and Popular Orthodoxy (Leiden 2004), esp. 173ff. It isworth noting that European vampire fiction had initially been influenced by Greek traditions,long before Bram Stoker’s Dracula; see K. Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London 1994), 24ff.

3 The literature on these issues is huge. See e.g. M. Summers, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (London – Boston 1926 [repr. 1973]); T. R. Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch(New Haven 1966); K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London 1971); N. Cohn,Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (London 1975); J. B.Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans (London 1980); R.Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (London 1976); Ibid., Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1989); C. Ginzburg, I

Benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra cinquecento e seicento (Torino 1966), trans. as Lesbatailles nocturnes. Sorcellerie et rituels agraires aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris 1984); Idem,Storia notturna: Una decifrazione de sabba (Torino 1989), trans. as Ecstasies: Deciphering theWitches’ Sabbath (London 1992); C. Larner, Witchcraft and Religion. The Politics of Popular

Belief (Oxford 1985); B. Ankarloo – G. Henningsen eds, Early Modern European Witchcraft.Centres and Peripheries (Oxford 1990); N. Jacques-Chaquin – M. Préaud eds, Le sabbat dessorciers en Europe (XVe-XVIIIe siècles). Colloque international E.N.S. Fontenay-Saint-Cloud(4-7 novembre 1992) (Grenoble 1993). On Byzantine magic and occultism, see R. P. H.Greenfield, Traditions of Belief in Late Byzantine Demonology (Amsterdam 1988); H. Maguireed., Byzantine Magic (Washington 1995); P. Magdalino – M. Mavroudi eds, The OccultSciences in Byzantium (Geneva 2006).

4 Pre-Ottoman Islamic magic, on the contrary, is rather well studied. See e.g. a collection of therelevant literature in Annales Islamologiques 11 (1972), 287-340; G. H. Bousquet, « Fiqh etsorcellerie: Petite contribution à l’étude de la sorcellerie en Islam », Annales de l'Institut desEtudes Orientales 8 (1949-50), 230-234 ; M. B. Smith, “The Nature of Islamic Geomancy witha Critique of a Structuralist’s Approach”, Studia Islamica 49 (1979), 5-38; T. Fahd, La


4/26

M. SARIYANNIS 198

scope of this short paper, I will lay emphasis to ghost and vampire stories, i.e. thepresence of the spirits of the dead in the world of the living; however, I will also try

to touch upon the issue of witchcraft and witch-hunting in Ottoman society, andmore generally of the position of the supernatural and the marvelous in theimaginary of Ottoman culture. I will not touch at all the subject of saintly marvels,miracles and apparitions, which deserves a study of its own.5

After these preliminary observations have been made, one could ask moreparticularly questions such as: How credible did stories involving supernaturalpowers and apparitions seem, on the one hand, and how they were dealt with, on theother? Were practitioners of sorcery accepted and tolerated, or they wereoccasionally persecuted, and in what occasions? How would an educated ulema

compromise such stories with his religion and his science? The vampirism and ghostcases present a particular interest in this aspect, since they concern the souls orspirits of the dead, and thus touch directly Islamic doctrine, especially eschatologyand its view on afterlife.

A Review of the Sources

Most of the witchcraft/vampirism cases mentioned in Ottoman sources were given inthe aforementioned discussion. The Ebussuud fetvas are among the most interestingfor our thread of thought; moreover, they record in a quite early age (the vampire

lore in Central Europe seems to have begun in the mid-1720s, with Austrian reportsfrom Serbia)6 a practice very similar to that observed in the classic vampire stories,

divination arabe. Etudes religieuses, sociologiques et folkloriques sur le milieu natif de l’islam(Leiden 1987); R. Lemay, “L’Islam historique et les sciences occultes”, Bulletin d’EtudesOrientales 44 (1992), 147-159; M. Dols, Majnûn: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, D.E. Immisch ed. (Oxford 1992), 261ff; A. Regourd – P. Lory eds., Sciences occultes et Islam,

Bulletin d’Études Orientales, Damas 43 (1993); P. Lory, « Soufisme et sciences occultes », inA. Popović – G. Veinstein eds, Les voies d’Allah. Les ordres mystiques dans l’islam des

origines à aujourd’hui (Paris 1996), 185-194; R. Gyselen (ed.), Charmes et sortilèges. Magie etmagiciens (Bures-sur-Yvette 2002 [Res Orientales XIV]); E. Francis, “Magic and Divination inthe Medieval Islamic Middle East”, History Compass 9 (2011), 622-633; N. Gardiner,“Forbidden Knowledge? Notes on the Production, Transmission, and Reception of the MajorWorks of Ahmad al-Bûnî”, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012), 81-143. I wascompleting this article when I ran into Z. Aycibin, “Osmanlı devleti’nde cadılar üzerine birdeğerlendirme”, OTAM: Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Ara tırma ve Uygulama Merkezi

Dergisi 24 (2008), 55-69. Studying more or less the same sources I study in the first part of thispaper, Ms Aycibin proposes a connection of the vampirism cases with the problem of internalmigration (i.e., that these stories were used as pretext for the villagers to flee, hence the directreaction of the state) which, interesting as it may be, seems not very probable to me.

5 On the general concept of miracles in Islam see Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (hereafter EI 2),s.v. “Karâma” (L. Gardet) and “Mu’djiza” (A. J. Wensinck); A. Schimmel, Mystical

Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill 1975), 205-213.6 See e.g. P. M. Kreuter, “The Role of Women in Southeast European Vampire Belief”, in A.

Buturovic and I. C. Schick (eds), Women in The Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and


5/26


namely digging the undead up, impaling and decapitating him or her.7 Three suchfetvas have been published.8 In the first, the mufti is asked the reason why the body

of some dead people becomes alive in the grave. Ebussuud’s answer is simple:If this is true, it is caused by God’s sacred will. There is a saying that “the wickedsouls (nüfûs-ı erîre) attach themselves (ta’allûk edip) to the corpses of those whowhile living were connected to them in their morals and practice, using [thesecorpses] as instruments for evil actions”. This is not improbable for the divinepower.

When asked what must be done with such a corpse, Ebussuud argues that itshould just be concealed (örtekomak gerektir ), since no harm comes thus to aMuslim dead; and he refutes the practice of digging the corpse out and burning it.

The next two fetvas, however, coming from another manuscript, are morespecific and also somehow contradictory in relation to the first one.9 According tothem, in a village near Selanik/Thessaloniki, a Christian presented himself in themiddle of the night to some of his relatives and acquaintances some days after hewas dead and buried, asking them to come and visit together other inhabitants, whodied the next day in their turn as well. Asked whether the Muslim inhabitants shouldflee the village in fear of the ghost, Ebussuud answers again that the unbelieversmay well be watchful, but the Muslims should do nothing but refer to the authorities.In the next fetva, however, he is asked to suggest an efficient way of dealing with

these bodies. The mufti then states that this is a problem too large for human mindsand languages to deal with; but one could first stake a scorched stick into the graveas far as it goes. If this is not successful, i.e. if there is still color in the corpse, itshead should be cut off and thrown near the feet of the body; or else, the corpse mustbe dug out and burnt. The contradiction with the first fetva mentioned can bereconciled if we take into account that in that instance, the problematic corpsebelonged to a Muslim, while in the second case local customs might perhaps beeffective in the eyhülislam’s thought.

This subtle distinction seems to have faded away some one and a half centuryafter Ebussuud. Markus Köhbach studied such a case, dating in the early 18th

History (London 2007), 231-242.7 In Bulgaria, this practice might date from the 13th century, as shown by recent excavations near

Sozopol, according to Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the Bulgarian National History Museum. Seehttp://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=139940, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18334106 (accessed September 2012).

8 M. E. Duzdağ, eyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi Fetvaları (Istanbul 1983), 197-198 (nos 980-982).

9 For a similar case, that might show that not all fetvas in Düzdağ’s book belong to Ebussuud, seeM. Sariyannis, “Law and Morality in Ottoman Society: The Case of Narcotic Substances”, in E.Kolovos, Ph. Kotzageorges, S. Laiou, M. Sariyannis (eds), The Ottoman Empire, the Balkansand the Greek Lands: Studies in Honor of John C. Alexander (Istanbul 2007), 307-321, at 318and fn. 2. On the manuscripts used by Düzdağ, see Düzdağ, Ebussuud Efendi Fetvaları 24-26.


6/26

M. SARIYANNIS 200

century (in 1701, as it seems).10 An anonymous chronicler recorded a report by thekadi of Edirne, as follows:

The inhabitants of the Mara village, district of Edirne, declared before thereligious court that some signs of evil spirits (ervâh-ı habîse alâ’imi) wereobserved upon the grave of the previously deceased Bıyıklı Ali, in thegraveyard of the aforementioned village; the inhabitants were filled with fear.Indeed, in the province of Rumili, when such signs are observed in someunbeliever’s grave, his body has to be nailed with a stake through his navel;if [the signs] persist, i.e. when the grave is opened the corpse is found in adifferent position and with its color changed to reddish, then it must bebeheaded and his head put next to his feet. If the signs still are not prevented

[thus], let them take the corpse out and burn it. Such was the fetva of the lateEbussuud Efendi concerning unbelievers; however, we cannot find suchinstructions in Arabic books.

The answer (a buyuruldu) is that “in order to dissipate this fancy (vahîme) of thevillagers”, the court must send a naib on the spot and authorize him to ask again theinhabitants. If they are to agree that “signs of evil spirits” are still apparent, the naibshould open the grave and check whether the color and position of the dead haschanged; the kadi is ordered to report again accordingly. The historian does not give

us the second report, but records a similar (and presumably contemporary) order tothe suba ı of Edirne:

The inhabitants of the Hacı Sarraf quarter in Edirne declared before the courtthat in the Muslim cemetery signs of witchcraft (câdû alâ’imi) appeared uponthe grave of a woman called Cennet, dead three months ago, and that they areoverwhelmed with groundless fear (vehm). The court sent a naib who openedthe grave; four women examined the deceased woman’s limbs and observedthat indeed her corpse was not rotten and her face was red; [according to thereport], such phenomena were signs of witchcraft. You are to open the

aforementioned grave and do whatever is accustomed (ne vech-ile def’imü’tâd ise) in order to remove the horror and illusions of the inhabitants.

In these early eighteenth-century documents, it is interesting to note that theauthorities were very careful to suggest that all these phenomena were nothing butillusions, and that local customs should be used in order to make the inhabitants feelsafe, rather than fight actual ghosts. Besides, this recourse to the local custom ofimpalement and/or burning of the vampires’ bodies seems to have continued wellinto the 19th century, as attested by an interesting report on two undead janissaries in

10 Köhbach, “Ein Fall von Vampirismus” (on the dating of the events, see in particular p. 87). TheOttoman text is now published as A. Özcan (ed.), Anonim osmanlı tarihi (1099-1116 / 1688-1704) (Ankara 2000), 148-149.


7/26


Tirnovo, which were dealt with by a Christian professional with a stake, boilingwater and finally fire (1833).11 Moreover, Michael Ursinus studied three records

from Bitola (Manastır), dated from the same period (1836, 1837, 1839), onpayments for “experts on witchcraft” (câdûcılar, câdû ustâdları) to be called uponsigns of magic that reportedly had been observed in the area.12 The phrasing is verysimilar to the early 18th-century documents cited above, and Ursinus concludes thatthe Bitola incidents were very probably concerning vampirism as well.

But vampirism in Ottoman literature is not an exclusively Balkan specialty. Anextremely interesting description by Evliya Çelebi (1611-1684) concerns a sort of“witches’ Sabbath” in the Obur mountains, between Circassia and Abkhazia in theCaucasus.13 He claims being an eye-witness to a fight between the obur s of the

Circassian and the Abkhazian tribes, which took place in 1666 (in fact, Evliya givesthe exact date: 20 evval 1076, which corresponds to April 24 or 25). Obur s, heexplains, are the wizards and sorcerers of these tribes (oburları, ya’ni sehhâr vesehereleri... obur demek sehhâr câzûlara derlermi ); the Abkhazian ones started theattack, flying upon every kind of house utensils, while their Circassian counterpartswere flying on dead horses and ship masts, armed with snakes and heads of variousanimals (human included). The fierce battle lasted for six hours, until the cockscrowed. The next day, Evliya and his companions visited the battlefield and found itfull of every conceivable utensil, corpses of various animals, corpses of dead people

out of their graves, and so on. This, reminiscent of European descriptions as it maybe, might be little more than an entertaining story; or else, it could reflect actualshamanistic beliefs, enhancing thus the much debated thesis by Carlo Ginzburg onthe folklore and shamanistic background of the Sabbath descriptions.14 Whatfollows, on the other hand, is very similar to the Balkan vampire tales:

11 The report was published in the state gazette, Takvîm-i Vekâyi’, issue no. 68 (21Cemaziyülevvel 1249). See Aycibin, “Osmanlı devletinde cadılar”, 59. Đlber Ortaylı( Đ mparatorlu ğ un en uzun yüzyılı, 3rd ed. (Istanbul 1995), 32 fn) maintains that the news were

made-up, as a result of the hatred of the state toward the janissaries even after 1826.12 Ursinus, “Osmanische Lokalbehörden der frühen Tanzimat”.13 Y. Dağlı, S. A. Kahraman, R. Dankoff eds, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 7 (Istanbul

2003), 279-280; cf. J.-L. Bacqué-Grammont, “Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi’nde büyü”, in N.Tezcan (ed.), Ça ğ ının sıradı ı yazarı Evliyâ Çelebi (Istanbul 2009), 87-90 at 90.

14 Ginzburg’s analysis of European witch trials, starting from the Benandante wizards ofsixteenth-century Friuli (NE. Italy), drove him to the conclusion that European folklore, fromthe Italian peninsula to the Baltic sea and Siberia, shares a common shamanistic background ofbattles with flying witches fighting over fertility. See Ginzburg, Les batailles nocturnes andmore comprehensively Idem, Ecstasies; Idem, “Deciphering the Sabbath”, in Ankarloo –Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft , 121-137; Idem, « Les origines du sabbat », in

Jacques-Chaquin – Préaud eds, Le sabbat des sorciers en Europe, 17-21; on “shamanist”elements in Hungarian witch cases see G. Klaniczay, “Hungary: The Accusations and theUniverse of Popular Magic”, in ibid., 219-255 at 243ff. However, Ginsburg’s thesis is stilldebatable, the common view being that witch trials reflect the ideas of the persecutors ratherthan actual folk rituals (see e.g. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons; Kieckhefer, European Witch


8/26

M. SARIYANNIS 202

There is no plague in these lands. Whenever a man gets a little sick, or evenif he doesn’t, in the kara konco[lo]z nights the obur s drink the blood of the

desired sick or healthy person… killing him; thus, obur s may become normal(obur oburlu ğ undan halâs olur ), although the signs of their obur ship (oburalâmeti) stay in their eyes.

In this region there are Circassian wise old men who can discern an obur , i.e.who can tell a wizard (obur tanıtıcı ya’ni câdî sihirbâz bilici). The relativesof the dead give them money, and they go to the graves of recently deceasedobur s to check the ground for signs that these latter ones went out of theirtombs. And indeed, when the people gather and dig the grave, they see that[the obur ’s] eyes are like cups full of blood, and that their face has become

all red from the human blood they have drunk. Then they take the filthycorpse of the cursed obur out of the grave and they nail a wooden stake intohis navel; with God’s help, the magic is thus destroyed. And the man whoseblood the obur had been drinking is saved from death… But some people,even after having found the obur in his grave and nailed thus his corpse…take the filthy carcass, with the stake still in his navel, and burn it, lestanother living obur enter the body.

We could note here en passant that the reference to the plague (Evliya adds later that

“so there is no plague in the Circassian lands, but truly the trouble of these obur s isworse than the greatest plague”) brings to mind another of Evliya’s descriptions,purportedly conveyed by his father, featuring the “army of the plague” (ta’ûnaskeri), consisting of both “benevolent and wicked souls” (ervâh-ı tayyibe, ervâh-ıhabîse) and ready to attack Istanbul on the eve of an epidemic.15 Now, back inCircassia, Evliya goes on explaining that whenever someone suspects an obur ofdrinking his blood, these wise obur -tellers check the suspect’s eyes. If they are fullof blood, the obur is bound in chains until he starts to confess: “Yes, it was me thatdrank So-and-So’s blood… When I was buried next to my obur grandfathers and my

Trials; and cf. Peter Burke’s concluding remarks, “The Comparative Approach to EuropeanWitchcraft”, in Ankarloo – Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft , 435-441). For theclassical descriptions of the Sabbath see Summers, The History of Witchcraft , 110-172. In hisrecent book, Ginzburg mentions Evliya’s description, although with certain mistakes (the day isconverted to 28 instead of 24/25 April, while the name of the wizards/witches is rendered uyuzinstead of obur due to the lacking transcription of the older Evliya editions). See Ginzburg,Ecstasies, 163-164.

15 The benevolent souls are clad in white and the maleficent in black; whoever is struck by theformer would be saved, by the latter would die. The chieftains of the two armies dictate thevictims’ names to a dervish, who brings the list to Murad IV. The Sultan does not believe him,but then a plague devastates the city for fourty days until all the names in the list die. See Y.Dağlı, S. A. Kahraman eds, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 4 (Istanbul 2001), 341-342.


9/26


obur fathers, my body did not rot; and sometimes I flied to the skies to fight; and Idid all this in order to live more (çok ya amak içün etdim)”.

Evliya adds that these obur s form a separate lineage (soy), refusing to enter intomarital relations with the rest of the Circassians, and that most of these obur s live inthe Moscovian, Cossack, Polish and Czech lands; but “it is certain that they are thekara koncolos of the Ottoman territories ( Rûm’da)”. The word obur appears oncemore in his work, this time in a Balkan context that puts forth the possibility of thename “vampire” having come from eastwards. When speaking of Oburça, a smallvillage near Shipka in modern central Bulgaria, Evliya notes that “obur means in theTatar language a wizard, a witch, or someone who returns from the grave (câdûya vesihirbâz avrete ve mezârda dirilene derler )”.16 The same meaning is attested in Rize,

in the Eastern Black Sea coast, where, one has to note, Circassian refugees fled afterthe conquest of their lands by the Russians in the early 1860s. Andreas Tietzeconsiders the word of Slavic origin,17 and indeed it can be supposed that theCircassians borrowed these traditions by their Russian neighbours – but can oneexclude the opposite? This is a question for specialists to answer;18 however, theassociation of those revenants with sorcerers’ fights might indeed be a Slavicinfluence.19

As for the mysterious kara koncoloz and his infamous nights, the word comesfrom Greek καλικάντζαρος (of uncertain etymology), a kind of goblin that appears

in the twelve days between Christmas and the Epiphany and plays tricks to people inGreek folk traditions.20 These are the original kara koncoloz nights or even days,

16 S. A. Kahraman, Y. Dağlı eds, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 6 (Istanbul 2002), 91.17 A. Tietze, “Slavische Lehnwörter in der türkischen Volksprache”, Oriens 10/1 (1957), 1-47, at

31-32 (no. 226); cf. R. Dankoff, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi okuma sözlü ğ ü (Istanbul 2008),183. On the Circassian expulsion to the Ottoman Empire see EI 2, s.v. “Čerkes”.iii (H. Đnalcık); Đ slam Ansiklopedisi, s.v. “Çerkesler” (M. Bala).

18 German Vampir (and its other West European forms) come from a Slavic word of various

forms (Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian вампир (vampir ), Czech upír , Ukrainian упир (upyr ),Russian упырь (upyr' ), all derived from Old East Slavic упирь (upir' ). It has been proposed(first by Franz Miklosich) that there is ultimately a Turkic etymology (Tatar ubyr ,“mythological creature”; Chuvash vă păr , “bad ghost of a witch, appearing in different forms”).See M. Vasmer, Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 4 vols (Heidelberg 1950-1958), s.v.„упырь“; K. M. Wilson, “The History of the Word Vampire”, Journal of the History of Ideas46 (1985), 577-583 and repr. in A. Dundes ed., The Vampire: A Casebook (Madison: TheUniversity of Wisconsin Press 1998), 3-11; U. Dukova, Die Bezeichungen der Dämonen im

Bulgarischen (Munich 1997), 96-100; P. M. Kreuter, “The Name of the Vampire: SomeReflections on Current Linguistic Theories on the Etymology of the Word Vampire”, in P. Day(ed.), Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Amsterdam – New York 2006), 57-

63.19 See E. Pócs, « Le sabbat et les mythologies indo-européennes », in Jacques-Chaquin – Préaud

eds, Le sabbat des sorciers en Europe, 23-31 at 30; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 160.20 See e.g. Hartnup, ‘On the Beliefs of the Greeks’, 29-30; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 168-169. As late

as in early nineteenth century, the fraction of the Old Notables of the Aegean island of Samos


10/26

M. SARIYANNIS 204

often mentioned by Evliya in Christian context;21 a slight nuance of the Circassianterror might be found in the description of a cavern in an Istanbul monastery, from

which “the sorcerers (câdûlar ) called kara koncoloz” go out every night and strollthe city in carriages till dawn during the very cold winter months.22 Interestingly, theword passed into Algerian Arabic as qârâqendlûz with the meaning “vampire,werewolf”.23

So much of vampires; another disquieting case where folk tradition challengesthe “legitimate” views on afterlife concerns ghosts, i.e. spirits of explicitly anddefinitely dead people who for one or another reason appear in front of the living.Ghost stories seem not to be a very common feature in Ottoman literature, and as wewill see such apparitions are often attributed to non-human spirits, namely jinn;24

however, we should remark that this may be due to the relative lack of interest forsuch texts rather than to the lack of stories themselves. Moreover, as we shall see, adistinction must be made between fictional stories and stories that are related as real,and this distinction is not always easy to see.

The poet Cinânî (d. 1595) composed at the Sultan’s request Bedâyiü’l-âsâr , acollection of prose stories, in 1590. This highly interesting work, published veryrecently by Osman Ünlü,25 contains ninety-nine short stories and vignettes. In hisown words, Cinani intended to collect stories about women and their stratagems,wars and battles, and “strange deeds and wonders from near and afar” (acâ’ib-i

umûr ve garâ’ib-i nezdîk ü dûr ); this last part contains twenty mirabilia, collectedfrom various oral sources, as it seems, from Anatolia, Africa and the Balkanpeninsula.26 Ranging from “natural monsters” (e.g. Siamese twins) to “supernatural

were nick-named Kallikantzaroi because of “their alleged habit of meeting during the night,since they supposedly could not realise their ‘dark’ plans in the daylight”: see S. Laiou,“Political Processes on the Island of Samos Prior to the Greek War of Independence and theReaction of the Sublime Porte: The Karmanioloi-Kallikantzaroi Conflict”, in A.Anastasopoulos (ed.), Political Initiatives ‘From the Bottom Up’ in the Ottoman Empire.

Halcyon Days in Crete VII: A Symposium Held in Rethymno, 9-11 January 2009(Rethymno2012), 91-105 at 93.

21 E.g. O. . Gökyay ed., Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 1 (Istanbul 1996), 22, 255.22 Ibid., 25.23 H. and R. Kahane – A. Tietze, The Lingua Franca in the Levant. Turkish Nautical Terms of

Italian and Greek Origin (Urbana 1958), 521-523 (no. 783).24 Possession by spirits is more common than actual ghost stories in Ottoman texts. One may

explore such stories as a challenge put against the “presumably very ancient culturaldifferentiation” Ginzburg makes between the Eurasian shaman who rules the spirits and theAfrican possessed person who “is at the mercy of the spirits and is ruled by them”. SeeGinzburg, Ecstasies, 249, citing L. de Heusch, « Possession et chamanisme », in Pourquoi

l’éspouser ? et autres essais (Paris 1971), 226ff.25 O. Ünlü (ed.), Cinânî: Bedâyiü’l-âsâr , 2 vols (Harvard 2009).26 On this genre cf. T. Fahd, « Le merveilleux dans la faune, la flore et les minéraux », in

Association pour l’Avancement des Études Islamiques – Centre de littérature et de linguistiquearabes du CNRS, L’étrange et le merveilleux dans l’Islam médiéval. Actes du colloque tenu au


11/26


wonders” (e.g. trees that cannot be removed, water sources that emanate sounds ofmusic, or mummified birds in Egypt), these mirabilia contain also four ghost stories,

classified in themselves as they constitute the last four items of the collection.27

Thefirst one resembles E. A. Poe’s famous story “The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar”: it relates that in the castle of Dıraç (Durrës, Durazzo), “by God’s order”souls of dead people entered the body of moribund persons (mukaddemen fevtolanlardan birinün rûhı Allahun emriyle cesedine duhûl edüp) and spoke with thelatter ones’ voice, asking their relatives for prayers:

For instance he says: “Hey tyrants, why don’t you inspect my case? I am So-and-so, son of So-and-so; they torment me greatly in the Hereafter (âhiretde).I had committed this or that sin; my torment is off-limits, and you, you stay

in my house and you wear my clothes and you spend my money: why don’tyou read any prayers for my soul (cânum), why don’t you make any charityfor my sake?” Thus he speaks in the language of the moribund, and thosewho know understand. […] If [the ghost] is a Muslim, they bring an ulema,who reads some verses from the Koran and drives it away; if it is a Christian,they bring a priest who reads from the Holy Gospel […] Let this not beconceived as farfetched or marvelous, for it has often happened that a soul orspirit (rûhı yahud cin) enters a corporeal form and speaks, with God’spermission. Such stories are well-known truth.

In the second story, a spirit (cin) enters a concubine (first described as “epileptic”,masrû’a) in Egypt; an expert (mu’âzzim)28 comes to drive it away, but the spiritspeaks Persian so the narrator has to translate. The spirit says that it is in love withthe girl and refuses to leave her; the expert ties her legs and starts beating her, thenburns a piece of paper into her nostrils and ears, and the spirit at last leaves the girl’sbody after agreeing upon Salomon’s seal not to possess her again. The end of thestory is quite interesting, as it shows that Ebussuud’s fetva was well-known at thisage as well as more than a hundred years later:

There are many stories of this kind, and there is no need to tell them sincethey are so famous. Many have related, and it cannot be denied, that wickedspirits (ervâh-ı habîse) cling to dead bodies (beden-i meyyit ), so that these

Collège de France à Paris, en mars 1974 (Paris 1978), 117-165 ; M. Rodinson, « La place dumerveilleux et de l’étrange dans la conscience du monde musulman médiéval », in ibid., 167-227; and (on its European counterparts) J. Le Goff, L’imaginaire médiéval (Paris 1985) ; Idem,« Préface » in Gervais de Tilbury, Le livre des merveilles (Paris 1992), ix-xvi.

27 Ünlü (ed.), Bedâyiü’l-âsâr , II: 334-337.28 The word is not found in Ottoman dictionaries; it is derived from azâ’im, “incantations, spells”.

See Türk Diyanet Vakfı Đ slam Ansiklopedisi (henceforth TDV Đ A), s.v. “Azâ’im” (S. Uludağ).Usually it means “exorcist”, especially in relation with magic healing of madness (Dols, The

Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, 276-278).


12/26

M. SARIYANNIS 206

become enchanted (câzû olmak ) and make strange movements. It is evenlawful ( er’î ) to nail to the ground bodies enchanted like this, or to cut their

heads, or –if those measures bring no result– to burn them. There areillustrious fetvas on this issue by the eyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi.

The third story concerns a maid (orfana) in the Morea (Peloponnese), whose masterused to come and have intercourse with her three or four months after his dead. Sheasked Piri Dede, an ulema of the region, for help; the ulema ambushed the ghost(that appeared in broad daylight) and attacked it with an iron skewer: the ghostvanished, and ten days later the girl died, and was buried next to her master. As forthe fourth and last story, it is about a ten-year-old girl in a nomadic Yörük tribe nearSanduklı, whose right thigh was possessed by a jinn.29 The spirit spoke in a whistle-

like voice, without the girl opening her mouth, and gave advice and oracles, with thegirl’s brother as intermediary. The narrator of the story himself, an assistant to thecourt, took the spirit’s advice on a mill he was commissioned to construct.

Could such marvelous and ostensibly unbelievable stories be attributed to theOttoman authors’ narrative techniques (as Ottoman fictional poems and storiesabound in witches, ghosts and jinn)30? Robert Dankoff makes such a caseconcerning Evliya Çelebi; speaking of a charming story about a Bulgarian witch, forinstance, he considers it mainly of “entertainment value” and he comments that“there is a thin line between magic as entertainment and magic as the manipulation

of supernatural powers”.31 Did Evliya really believe these exaggerations, to say theleast? Probably not, although we might suppose that he related stories that he hadheard and perhaps believed, only presenting himself as an eye-witness to addcredibility; but then, did he expect his audience to believe them? Or did hedeliberately try to entertain an audience that would expect pure entertainment mixedto the hard facts of a travel account? Such questions are beyond the scope of thisarticle and cannot be discussed here; however, a thorough study of magic and

29 Although it might be completely irrelevant, here one must cite Carlo Ginzburg’s analysis on themotive of lameness as connected to the world of the dead: Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 226ff.

30 See e.g. the rest of Cinani’s work, or its more or less contemporary M. Çakır – H. Koncu eds, XVI. yüzyıldan bir a k hikâyesi: Medhî’nin îr-i dilîr bâ-mihr-i münîr’i (Istanbul 2010). EdithGülçin Ambros, who notified me of this latter edition, kindly informed me that she is preparingan article on Ottoman prose narrative techniques with a high relevance to such questions.

31 R. Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality. The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden 2004), 202-203. Thestory (which Dankoff gives in translation) can also be found in S. A. Kahraman, Y. Da ğlı eds,Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 3 (Istanbul 1999), 210-211. The woman is said by a peasantto be of “a different breed. She used to turn into a witch once a year on a winter’s night, but this

year she turned into a hen”. Interesting, what Dankoff translates as “witch” is our well-knownkara koncolos (ol karı ba ka soydur. Kı geceleri yılda bir kerre eyle kara koncolos olurdu.

Ammâ bu yıl tavuk oldu); moreover, the description reminds of the Circassian obur who alsoform a “separate breed”. On the transformation of Slavic witches to hens cf. Pócs, « Le sabbatet les mythologies indo-européennes », 30.


13/26


supernatural elements in Ottoman literature would be very useful, for instance inclarifying the mutual feedback between beliefs and fiction or the development of

stereotypes.32

On the other hand, it is important to note that Cinani, an educated ulema and allthe more so a teacher (müderris),33 narrates his ghost stories (in sharp contrast to therest of his book, which explicitly contains entertaining material for story-tellers) astrue events related from trustworthy and reliable sources, whose names andreferences he gives meticulously. The curious reference (in his first story) to theefficacy of various religious exorcisms according to the religion of the ghostenhances the sincerity of his narrative. Similar mirabilia are occasionally recordedin history books, as for instance when Abdülkadir Efendi (d. ca. 1644) describes a

cave in ehrizor (modern Northern Iraq) as a “lair of sorcery” (câzûlar yurdu),where people were trapped and killed with magic.34 As for the vampire storiesrecorded in the eyhülislam’s or the kadi’s archives, the very nature of our sourcesshows that Ottoman administration took these stories quite seriously. On the onehand, it had to handle the local population’s fears and “illusions”; on the other, thereare no signs that it questioned the actual happening of vampire-like phenomena,even if it kept its doubts on their real causes.

Witchcraft, Sorcery, Persecution –or the Lack of It

A note on terminology might be in place here. In the examples given above, we sawthe use of the expressions “evil souls/spirits”, on the one hand, and “witchcraft”(cadu, cazu), on the other, concerning what might be called in modern termsvampirism. The word câdû, of Persian origin, means “witchcraft, sorcery” and isalready attested in Ottoman Turkish in a mid-fifteenth-century collection of stories,the famous Ferec ba’de’ - idde, as well as in Yazıcıoğlu Ahmed Bîcan’scontemporary Dürr-i meknûn (where it denotes the Pharaoh’s magicians whopractice sorcery, sihr );35 it was in the same use that we found it in one of the

32 Cf. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 105-115 for a review of courtly medieval Europeanliterature regarding magic.

33 On his biography see Ünlü (ed.), Bedâyiü’l-âsâr , I: 6-8.34 Z. Yılmazer (ed.), Topçular Kâtibi ‘Abdülkâdir (Kadrî) Efendi Tarihi (Metin ve tahlîl) (Ankara

2003), 914.35 F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (London 1892), 349; A. Tietze,

Tarihi ve etimolojik Türkiye türkçesi lugatı / Sprachgeschichtliches und etymologischesWörterbuch des Türkei-Türkischen, v. I (Istanbul – Wien 2002), 412, s.v. “cadu/cazu/cazı”; G.Hazai – A. Tietze (eds), Ferec ba’d e - idde, „Freud nach Leid“ (Ein frühosmanischesGeschichtenbuch), 2 vols (Berlin 2006), 1: 216; N. Sakaoğlu (ed.), Yazıcıo ğ lu Ahmed Bîcan:

Dürr-i meknun (Saklı inciler) (Istanbul 1999), 107 (cf. also 74 on “the sorcerers of Babylon”used by Nimrud). Sevan Nianyan’s online etymologic dictionary locates the first appearance ofthe word in Aık Paa’s Garib-nâme (1330): http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=cad%C4%B1.Meninski’s 1680 dictionary contains only the “sorcery, witchcraft” meaning (François deMesgnien [Meninski], Thesaurus linguarum orientalium…, vols I-VI, Vienna 1680, I :1543),


14/26

M. SARIYANNIS 208

examples by Cinani. As far as I can see, the meaning “vampire (spectre) / Vampyr(Gespenst)” is first recorded in Julius Zenker’s dictionary (1866), while James

Redhouse (1890) offers the somehow “westernized” (with its reference to blood-sucking) definition “a dead person superstitiously supposed to return to earth, inorder to suck the blood of persons asleep, a vampire” (and câdûluk etmek : “to act asa vampire”; câdılanmak : “to become a wizard, witch, hag, or vampire”, etc.).36 Although in Evliya’s use it may denote an actual vampire, it still means “witchcraft”in general (for instance, Evliya couples it with sihirbâz, “sorcerer”). In ourexamples, it is only to be found with this meaning after the beginnings of theeighteenth century, in the anonymous chronicler’s account of the Edirne judge. Eventhere, however, a possible interpretation is that it does not mean “vampire”, only

implying that the strange signs were the result of unspecified witchcraft. The wayCinani reformulates Ebussuud’s fetva (using the word cazu/cadu, which is not to befound in his prototype) enhances this view: wicked spirits, he says, enchant thecorpses and make them move.

Now, stories about jinn abound in Ottoman literature37 and, as Cinani himselfnotes, are not inconsistent with Islamic theology.38 Indeed, as noted in theEncyclopaedia of Islam, “[i]n official Islam the existence of the djinn wascompletely accepted, as it is to this day, and the full consequences implied by theirexistence were worked out”; in fact, the jinn are a third category of beings, distinct

while Jean Daniel Kieffer and Thomas-Xavier Bianchi, Dictionnaire turc-français à l’usage desagents diplomatiques et consulaires, des commerçants, des navigateurs et autres voyageursdans le Levant , 2 vols (Paris 1835-1837), I : 352, give an emphasis to the female element:“câdû, câdı: Sorcier et surtout sorcière – Gidi câdû: Vilaine sorcière”. Indeed, in literary workssuch as Medhî’s îr-i dilîr bâ-mihr-i münîr , a love romance with folk-tale elements composedin the late sixteenth century, plenty of wicked câdû appear, all female: see Çakır – Koncu eds,

XVI. yüzyıldan bir a k hikâyesi, 25-27 and passim. Unfortunately, the lack of gender in Turkishgrammar makes many of the references of the word in Ottoman literature unclear and “sex-

blind”. On the use of the word in medieval Persian literature, cf. M. Gaillard, « Foi héroiquecontre magie démoniaque: une lutte exemplaire », in Gyselen (ed.), Charmes et sortilèges, 109-163; M. Omidsalar, “Magic ii. In Literature and Folklore in the Islamic Period”, Encyclopaedia

Iranica, online edition, 2012, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/magic-ii-in-literature-and-folklore-in-the-islamic-period (accessed on October 2012); Omidsalar notes thatthe words jâdu (câdu) and sehr (sihr ) have some “negative connotation” (in contrast withafsun).

36 J. T. Zenker, Dictionnaire turc-arabe-persan (Leipzig 1866; repr. Hildesheim 1967), I:339; J.W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (Constantinople 1890), 634, s.v.

37 There are more jinn stories in Cinani’s work than those described, but they are supposed to bemuch nearer to fiction than the last ones. See the analysis by Ünlü (ed.), Bedâyiü’l-âsâr , I: 87-

91.38 See Ünlü (ed.), Bedâyiü’l-âsâr , I: 88; I did not have access to: G. Scognamillo – A. Arslan,

Do ğ u ve Batı kaynaklarına göre cinler (Istanbul 1993); A. O. Ate, Kuran ve hadislere görecinler – büyü (Istanbul 1995); or S. Ate, Đ nsan ve insanüstü: Ruh – melek – cin – insan(Istanbul 1979).


15/26


from both humans and angels, and according to some scholars the Devil (Đblis) is butone of them.39 As a matter of fact, they were also a plausible means of explaining

aca’ib or mirabilia, such as those described by Cinani: in Yazıcıoğlu AhmedBîcan’s famous mid-fifteenth century Ottoman cosmography, we read that after thecreation of Man, the jinn were expelled to islands, but “now from time to time theyremember their old abodes and return, settling in the roots of trees or near watersand sources. These places are called ayazma [sacred fountain, Gk. αγίασα]… mostunbelievers believe in these, saying that this or that source or tree is exalted (ulu)”.40

Moreover, the science of commanding jinn and demons (azâ’im) was acceptedby paragons of Ottoman science such as Taköprüzâde or Kâtib Çelebi; the lattermakes a distinction between “permissible” (mubâh) spells, which are made through

the names of God and Koranic recitations, and forbidden ones, made with charms,sorcery and talismans. However, he specifies that both kinds of magic cannot beperformed but with God’s help, since it is Him who has ordained that the jinn can besubdued to man.41 Elsewhere, Kâtib Çelebi maintains that while practicing sorcery(sihr ) is undoubtedly prohibited, knowing its ways is permissible or evencommendable: for instance, through magic one may discover a false prophet or amurderer. In fact, he says, this is a natural science based on the deep knowledge ofstars, minerals and herbs; it is secrecy that makes people wonder.42 And indeed,recent studies show that while “sorcery” (sihr ) was a rather reproachful activity in

early modern Islam, occult sciences such as those described by Kâtib Çelebiconstituted an integral part of Ottoman scholarship of this period43 (although

39 EI 2, s.v. “Djinn”.II (D. B. MacDonald – [H. Massé]); TDV Đ A, s.v. “Cin” (A. S. Kılavuz); Dols,The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, 212ff; D. De Smet, « Anges, diables et démons engnose islamique. Vers l’islamisation d’une démonologie néoplatonicienne », R. Gyselen (ed.),

Démons et merveilles d’Orient (Bures-sur-Yvette 2001 [Res Orientales XIII]), 61-70. On Iblisbeing a jinn see EI 2, s.v. “Iblîs” (A. J. Wensinck-[L. Gradet]).

40 Sakaoğlu (ed.), Yazıcıo ğ lu Ahmed Bîcan: Dürr-i meknun, 47.

41 TDV Đ A, s.v. “Azâ’im” (S. Uludağ); Kâtib Çelebi, Ke f-el-zunun, . Yaltkaya – K. R. Bilge eds,2 vols (n.l. [Istanbul] 1943), II: 1137-1138; O. . Gökyay, Kâtip Çelebi’den seçmeler (Istanbul1968), 227-228; Dols, The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, 272-273; cf. also M. Asatrian,“Ibn Khaldun on Magic and the Occult”, Iran and the Caucasus 7-1/2 (2003), 73-123 on thesimilar (but much more elaborate) analysis by Ibn Khaldun. This distinction of magic brings tomind Edward W. Lane’s observation that “[t]he more intelligent of the Muslims distinguish twokinds of magic, which they term “Er-Roohánee”… and “Es-Seemiya”. The former is spiritualmagic, which is believed to effect its wonders by the agency of angels and genii, and by themysterious virtues of certain names of God and other supernatural means; the latter is naturaland deceptive magic, and its chief agents the less credulous Muslims believe to be certainperfumes and drugs…”: E. W. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern

Egyptians, Written in Egypt During the Years 1833-1835 (London 1896; repr. 1986), 272.42 Kâtib Çelebi, Ke f-el-zunun, II: 980-982; Gökyay, Kâtip Çelebi’den seçmeler , 233-234.43 See Lory, « Soufisme et sciences occultes »; Gardiner, “Forbidden Knowledge?”, esp. 129ff.

This is particularly true for astrology and fortune-telling, which were respected and widespreadoccupations in Ottoman culture: see e.g. Đ. H. Ertaylan, Falnâme (Istanbul 1951); Đ. H. Aksoyak


16/26

M. SARIYANNIS 210

Ebussuud Efendi had kept a more ambiguous attitude44). This can explain why wedo not see any systematic witch-hunting in Ottoman history, although there are some

such cases. For one thing, accusations for sorcery would easily be used to strengthena persecution, as in the case of the famous Ester Kira Hatun,45 while some magiciansor soothsayers would occasionally be executed as disturbers of peace: these cases,however, were political persecutions on the basis of “reason of state” rather thanhunting witchcraft as such, i.e. as contact with the supernatural.46 One case in which

(ed.), Kefeli Hüseyin: Râznâme (Süleymaniye, Hekimo ğ lu Ali Pa a No. 539) (Harvard 2004); G.T. Koç, “An Ottoman Astrologer at Work: Sadullah el-Ankarâvi and the Everyday Practice of

Đ lm-i Nücûm”, in F. Georgeon – F. Hitzel (eds), Les Ottomans et le temps (Leiden 2012), 39-59; M. And, Turkish Miniature Painting. The Ottoman Period (Istanbul 1987), 126, 140.During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were soothsayers and occultists that playedan imminent role in palace politics, such as Remmal (the geomancer) Haydar, who came fromIran to Suleyman the Magnificent’s court, or the more well-known Süca Efendi (d. 1582) andCinci Hoca (d. 1648), consultants of Murad III and Ibrahim respectively. See C. Fleischer,“Shadows of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul”, International Journal ofTurkish Studies 13/1-2 (2007), 51-62; Idem, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the OttomanEmpire: The Historian Mustafa Âlî (1541-1600) (Princeton 1986), 72-73; Idem, “AncientWisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and EarlySixteenth Centuries”, in M. Farhad – S. Bağcı (eds), Falnama: The Book of Omens

(Washington 2009), 231-244; C. Kafadar, Asiye Hatun: Rüya mektupları (Istanbul 1994), esp.33-39 (now repr. in Idem, Kim var imi biz burada yo ğ iken. Dört Osmanlı: Yeniçeri, Tüccar,

Dervi ve Hatun [Istanbul 2009], 123-191, at 144-149); EI 2, s.v. “Husayn Efendi, known asDjindji Khodja” (C. Orhonlu). A thorough study of Ottoman sources on all these cases wouldbe very useful for exploring Ottoman attitudes toward magic and the occult.

44 He condemns various sorts of divination, especially when practiced by ulema, but does notdeem necessary to punish those who run to a geomancer (remmâl): Düzdağ, Ebussuud EfendiFetvaları, 199 (nos 985-988). It might not be a coincidence that a geomancer, Haydar, was aclose companion of the Sultan Suleyman’s (see above, previous fn.).

45 She is described as a “filthy sorceress… with devilish actions” (sâhire-pelîd… eytân ef’âlimukarrer ) by Topçular Kâtibi Abdülkâdir Efendi: Yılmazer (ed.), Topçular Kâtibi Tarihi, 272-

273. Cf. also ibid., 1081, for a description of “heretical dervishes… wizards, slaves of wickeddeeds” ( zındık dervi ler... sâhirler, ef’âl-ı habîs kulları). The infamous Cinci Hoca’sinvolvement with magic (efsûn) is also described with some contempt (but not much emphasis)by M. Đpirli (ed.), Târih-i Na’imâ (Ankara 2007), III: 973-974.

46 See e.g. M. Đpirli (ed.), Selânikî Mustafa Efendi: Tarih-i Selânikî (971-1003/1563-1595) (Ankara 1999), 45 on the execution of a geomancer (remmâl) following Suleyman theMagnificent’s campaign, just before his death (cf. Ertaylan, Falnâme, 28-29; N. Vatin,« Comment on garde un secret. Une note confidentielle du grand-vizir Sokollu Mehmed Paa enseptembre 1566 », in E. Kermeli – O. Özel (eds), The Ottoman Empire: Myths, Realities and‘Black Holes’. Contributions in Honour of Colin Imber (Istanbul 2006), 239-255 at 249); Đpirli(ed.), Târih-i Na’imâ, II: 879 (in 1638 a pasha is accused of “smoking and making magic”

[duhân içer ve sihir eder ] with the help of talismans [vefk ]; cf. ibid., III: 981); A. Özcan (ed.), Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Pa a: Zübde-i Vekayiât. Tahlil ve metin (1066-1116/1656-1704)(Ankara 1995), 503-504 (execution of an astrologer involved in an Edirne small-scale coup-d’état in 1694). A 1571 order against a person who pretended to summon the jinn in order tofind hidden treasures may have no political connotations, but on the other hand the accused is


17/26


sorcery is an object of imminent and general persecution can be found in a fetva byAbdurrahim Efendi, who served as eyhülislam for a short but influential term in

1715-1716:47

If it is evident according to the Sharia that Zeyd is a magician and a habitualoffender (sahir olub sa’i bi’l-fesâd oldu ğ u), is it legitimate to execute Zeyd?

Answer: It is legitimate.

However, it is to be noted that even then, the mere accusation of sorcery seemsinadequate for a condemnation, as it has to be strengthened by the all-inclusive term“habitual offender”. Another fetva of the same period approves the execution of amagician (and all the more so, by siyaset, or administrative rather than religious

authority), but only because in order to perform his magic he committed blasphemyupon the Holy Book:

Zeyd the magician (sahir ), maliciously (ihaneten) puts the papers where theQuranic verses are written under the millstone and if it is certain by recourseto the Sharia that he is accustomed to grinding the grand verses under themillstone saying that “I wrenched one’s head to this direction and I turnedanother’s heart to that direction” and if he is apprehended before repentance,is it legitimate to execute Zeyd by siyaset ?

Answer: It is legitimate.Nonetheless, elsewhere the same eyhülislam denies a woman’s request to abstainfrom sexual intercourse with her husband because the latter admitted that hebelieved in magic (sahrın vuku’u vardır inanırım dise).48 At any rate, there isundoubtedly no evidence of massive and systematic persecution of magic andsorcerers by the Ottoman authorities.

also said to have taken advantage of virgin girls for this purpose: A. Refik (Altınay), On altıncıasırda Rafızîlik ve Bekta ilik (Istanbul 1932), 30-31. Al-Nasafî’s (b. 1068) Akâ’id al-Nasafiyya,a textbook taught in the Ottoman medreses well till the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,stated that “admitting as true what the soothsayers (kâhin) predict on the future events is an actof infidelity”: M. S. Yazıcıoğlu, Le Kalâm et son rôle dans la société turco-ottomane aux XVeet XVIe siècles (Ankara 1990), 324.

47 E. E. Tualp, “Treating Outlaws and Registering Miscreants in Early Modern Ottoman Society:A Study on the Legal Diagnosis of Deviance in eyhülislam Fatwas”, unpublished M.A. thesis,Sabancı University, 2005, 43. On the term sa’i bi’l-fesâd see U. Heyd, Studies in Old OttomanCriminal Law, ed. V. L. Ménage (Oxford 1973), 195-198.

48 Tualp, “Treating Outlaws and Registering Miscreants”, 71-72. Both fetvas belong to Behçetü’l-fetava, a collection of fetvas by Yeniehirli Abdullah Efendi, who served as eyhülislam from 1718 to 1730. In such fetvas we can find some cases that bring to mind CarloGinsburg’s Menocchio: see ibid., 69ff. On siyaset punishment see Heyd, Old Ottoman Criminal

Law, 192-195.


18/26

M. SARIYANNIS 212

If we are to accept Robert Muchembled’s view, the early modern Europeanwitch-hunt phenomenon was connected to a double crisis: firstly, a crisis of the

medieval state and of the unity of Christendom, and secondly, a crisis of the ruralworld, which had to succumb to state authorities, giving up all its beliefs or“superstitions” and a whole system of private vengeance and internal checks andbalances (this breaking-up of the closed village community is also mentioned byPeter Brown as a factor that had led much earlier, from the eleventh or twelfthcentury onwards, to a new understanding of the supernatural, now restrained in theindividual rather than expressing the collective values of the community).49 Incontrast, the Ottomans never experienced any major breach of their religious order(with the one and important exception of the early sixteenth-century Safavid

influence to the Alevi populations of the Empire),50

nor did the rural world in the

49 R. Muchembled, “Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality”, in Ankarloo – Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft , 139-160; P. Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A MedievalChange”, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 104/2 (Spring1975), 133-151.

50 As a matter of fact, and as Leslie Peirce noted in the H-TURK discussion mentioned in thebeginning of this paper, heretics and especially the Alevi Kızılba figured as objects ofsystematic persecution, the way witches functioned in the West; in the peak of this anti-Shi’a

wave, Selim I sent orders to all the judges of Anatolia just before marching against ah Đsma’il(1514), ordering that all Kızılba from seven to seventy years old were registered (ol gürûh-ımekrûhdan idü ğ i sâbit olan e kıyânın esâmileri deftere kayd olunub); purportedly, up to 40,000men were either slain or imprisoned (kimi maktûl kimi mahbus olmu idi). See Hoca Sa’deddin,Tac el-tevârih (Konstantiniye 1862), vol. II, 245-246; Solakzade, Solakzâde Tarihi (Istanbul1879/80), 360-361; on the Kızılba, see e.g. I. Mélikoff, « Le problème Kızılba », Turcica 6(1975), 49-67. However, it is unclear if the phrase “those who were proven of belonging to theabominable group” refers to the members of the Kızılba tribe, the followers of ah Đsmail, orheretic Alevis in general; moreover, the number of 40,000 may be highly exaggerated and atany rate these persecutions have lasted much less than the European witch-hunt: see theanalysis by F. Emecen, Zamanın Đ skenderi, arkın fatihi: Yavuz Sultan Selim (Istanbul 2010),

95-100, who points out that no contemporary source records the massacre (cf. A. Uğur, The Reign of Sultan Selîm I in the Light of the Selîm-nâme Literature (Berlin 1985), 227ff).Nevertheless, a general wave of anti-heretic activities did begin in the early sixteenth century,addressed against heterodox dervishes such as the Kalenderîs: Refik, On altıncı asırda Rafızîlik ;A. Y. Ocak, Osmanlı Đ mparatorlu ğ unda marjinal sûfîlik: Kalenderîler (XIV-XVII. yüzyıllar)(Ankara 1992), 125ff.; Idem, “Kalenderi Dervishes and Ottoman Administration from theFourteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries”, in G. M. Smith – C. W. Ernst (eds), Manifestations ofSainthood in Islam (Istanbul 1993), 239-255; Idem, Osmanlı toplumunda zındıklar ve mülhidler(15.-17. yüzyıllar) (Istanbul 1998). There are relevant documents that ressemble strongly thetrial processes of the early modern Inquisition; see e.g. Refik, On altıncı asırda Rafızîlik , 29-30(where a woman denounces her husband); A. Tietze, “A Document on the Persecution of

Sectarians in Early Seventeenth-Century Istanbul”, in A. Popovic – G. Veinstein (eds), Bektachiyya. Études sur l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach (Istanbul 1995), 165-170 (and one has to note the strikingly objective and truth-lovingaccount by Evliya: R. Dankoff, “An Unpublished Account of mum söndürmek in theSeyâhatnâme of Evliya Chelebi”, in ibid., 69-73). The political connotations of these


19/26


Balkans or Anatolia ever have to give up its system of values and internal moralequilibrium in favor of central state interventions. Ruth Martin shows how early

modern Venice sought to eliminate witchcraft rather than witches, thus avoidingsystematic persecutions like the witch-hunting that prevailed in other areas thatperiod. She argues that the main reasons for these were firstly, the emphasis of thelocal Inquisition (which functioned in an entirely bureaucratic way that left no spacefor individual initiatives of mass hysteria) on the witches’ repentance, rather thanpunishment; secondly, the fact that the emphasis on heresy left maleficium, ormaleficent magic (in contrast to magic healing, divination, etc.) out of theInquisitors’ jurisdiction: in Martin’s words, “the link between maleficium and heresywas simply never made in Venice”.51 In the Ottoman case, the absence of any

systematic witch-hunting could also be attributed to the religious character of theauthority that had jurisdiction over sorcery, i.e. the eyhülislam or the local müftis’offices in the first place; all the more since no heresy was permanently linked towitchcraft. On the other hand, in contrast to the Venetian Inquisition, Ottomanauthorities seem to have accepted or at least tolerated witchcraft in general, but kepta vigilant eye over sorcerers and witches and punished them whenever they weresuspected either of heresy/blasphemy or for political incitation.

This view is concomitant with the absence of Devil as an actual evil-doer inIslamic theology: indeed, contrary to what the medieval and early modern

Christianity tended to maintain,

52

the Devil’s role in Islam is mainly that of thetempter, of a bad influence for humans but not (as Leslie Peirce noted in the 2002discussion) an active assistant of tempted wizards and witches.53 Although blackmagic (sihr ) is connected with demoniacal forces in the Quran and condemned bothin the Quran and in several hadiths, in the course of the following centuries it waslinked first to the jinn and then (as also seen in the above-mentioned analysis byKâtib Çelebi) to the “awareness of the causal mechanism which rules nature and[p]enetrating the affinities which bind mankind and the cosmos closely together”;54 in our examples, we saw some references to “wicked spirits”, but not to devilishones. An exception may be a reference to Persian sorcery (sihir ) used to enfeeble

persecutions are much more evident in comparison with the European witch-hunting.51 R. Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650 (Oxford 1989), esp. 253ff.52 Early Christian writers associated magic with demons (which they associated to the Devil,

contrary to the pagan notion of neutral spirits), while in the late Middle Ages onwards(culminating with the witch-hunting of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries) theDevil enters as a protagonist in necromancy and witchcraft cases, although it may be the casethat his presence was overplayed by religious propaganda; see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle

Ages, 36ff., 151ff., 194ff.53 See EI 2, s.v. “Iblîs” (A. J. Wensinck-[L. Gradet]) and “Shaytân”.2 (D. Gimaret); TDV Đ A, s.v.

“ eytan” (Đ. Çelebi). A different direction that does not touch directly the subject of this paperis followed by Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 193-199.

54 EI 2, s.v. “Sihr” (T. Fahd).


20/26

M. SARIYANNIS 214

Ottoman defense of Baghdad in 1625/26, where we read of “satanic acts” (a’mâl-i eytâniyye); the fact that Persians were considered heretics may have contributed in

this aspect.55

In sharp contrast, the Malleus Maleficarum, the famous late-fifteenthcentury German handbook for the prosecution of witches, put forth “the Devil, awitch, and the permission of Almighty God”, as “the three necessary concomitantsof witchcraft”.56

The Dead and the Living: Theology and Tradition

Moving away from witchcraft, vampirism and ghosts present yet another problemfor the religious and legal thought of both Christianity and Islam, since theychallenge directly their conceptions of afterlife. Being essentially a Balkan

phenomenon, as it may seem, vampirism was touched upon first by the OrthodoxChurch, beginning in the early fifteenth century. Already in 1438, the Patriarch ofConstantinople had asserted that cases of corpses that do not decay and aresuspected of wicked activity are creatures of the Devil, and instructed that peopleshould not burn these corpses, as was the custom. These prohibitions went onthroughout the Ottoman period, and in some cases the Church even threatened withexcommunication those who were burning corpses for this reason.57 In the versiongiven by an ecclesiastical ruling (nomokanon) and copied by Leo Allatius/Allatios orLeone Allacci (1586-1669), a Greek Catholic who first described the βρυκόλακας

(the Greek equivalent of a vampire), it is the devil that possesses a corpse “wearingit like a cloth” and prevents it from decaying, in order to lure the credulous peopleinto burning it and thus commit a great sin; it seems that the Church first tried torefute the corporeal existence of the creature (since it would deny the revenant anypossibility of resurrection at the Last Judgment) and to deny any responsibility ofthe dead for such phenomena, then found a solution nearer to the popular beliefs, i.e.that these were the bodies of people excommunicated by the Church.58 Although the

55 Đpirli ed., Târih-i Na’imâ, II: 596. The “satanic acts” are attributed to Bahâeddin Âmilî, who ispresented as a Kızılba follower, for whom Persians had great esteem. Na’ima’s source, KâtibÇelebi, lacks these details, mentioning only the charms used against the Ottoman army: KâtibÇelebi, Fezleke, 2 vols, (Đstanbul 1869-1870), II: 86-87.

56 This is the title of the first part of the book. See M. Summers (ed.), Malleus Maleficarum (NewYork 1928; repr. 1970), 1.

57 See P. Michailaris, Αφορισός . Η προσαρογή ιας ποινής στις αναγκαιότητες της Τουρκοκρατίας (Athens 1997), 290-293.

58 See the detailed analysis and all the relevant literature in Hartnup, ‘On the Beliefs of theGreeks’, 173ff. (and 2 fn. 6 on how scholars dealt with this reference). Unfortunately, as far as Iknow Allatius’ book ( De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus) has not been translated;

the relevant passages are in Leo Allatius, De templis graecorum recentioribus – De nartheceecclesiae veteris – De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (Colonia Agrippina [Köln(Amsterdam?)] 1645), 142ff. R. P. H. Greenfield notes that “the common later concept ofvampires and revenants scarcely appears in [late Byzantine] sources at all” (Greenfield, Late

Byzantine Demonology, 168 fn. 518).


21/26


resurrection of the bodies is undoubtedly upheld by Islam as well, it does not seemthat such thoughts ever entered the mind of Ebussuud and his successors.59

On the other hand, the reference to wicked “souls” in the first two Cinanistories60 (but also in Ebussuud’s first fetva) leaves open the possibility that suchphenomena are caused by the spirits of the dead. However, it is more probable thatwhat the author had in mind was evil spirits, or jinn, rather than human souls; or atleast that he formulated his phrasing very carefully in order to leave this ambiguity.(In the same vein, most early Christian authors refuted the Biblical reference to the“witch of Endor” fetching prophet Samuel’s ghost, maintaining that what appearedlike the dead prophet was merely a demon).61 And indeed the terms “soul” and“spirit”, or nefs and ruh, have produced considerable confusion as to whether they

are discernible and which one remains with the body in the time of death:62

thus, itremains open to speculation whether Ebussuud’s or Cinani’s “wicked spirits”(nüfûs-ı erîre or ervâh-ı habîse: note that plural forms of both nefs and ruh areused) are jinn or souls of the dead. In the first case, as we saw above, their presenceis totally acceptable by the official Islamic theology; in the second, it is more thandubious, since communication between the living and the dead is mostly accepted tobe done through dreams. Indeed, dreams are licitly conceived as bridges ofcommunication between this world and the hereafter, and examples abound both ineducated Ottoman circles and in local folklore;63 Ottoman fortune-telling stories

59 See J. I. Smith – Y. Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Oxford 2002), 57, 73. At any rate, Hızır Bey (1407-1459), one of the most prominenttheologians of the early Ottoman period, argues that the fate of the limbs of a corpse plays norole at all for the resurrection of the body (Yazıcıoğlu, Le Kalâm et son rôle, 290).

60 Osman Ünlü, however, understands the phrase bir kâlibün rûhı yâhud cin girüp as Cinaniconsidering the evil presence a jinn, rather than a soul (bunun ruh de ğ il cin oldu ğ unu söyler ):Ünlü (ed.), Bedâyiü’l-âsâr , I:91.

61 Summers, The History of Witchcraft , 176-181; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 33, 152;The Catholic Encyclopaedia (New York, 1907-1914), s.v. “Necromancy” (Ch. Dubray);

Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 589; on the Muslim perspective, cf. Ch. M.Moreman, Beyond the Threshold: Afterlife Beliefs and Experiences in World Religions(Lanham, Maryland 2010), 88-89. The Biblical reference is in I Samuel 28:3-25. Keith Thomasargued that the Catholic Church was prone to admit the existence of ghosts, as it was teaching“that such apparitions were the souls of those trapped in Purgatory, unable to rest until they hadexpiated their sins”, while on the contrary the Reformation rejected vehemently this view as itdid for the existence of Purgatory (Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 587ff); the“witch of Endor” presented the additional problem of a human being summoning a ghost. SomeByzantine sources suggested that demons might be souls of the dead, a belief rejected bystandard orthodoxy (Greenfield, Late Byzantine Demonology, 168).

62 See Smith – Haddad, Death and Resurrection, 17-21 and cf. 36.

63 See e.g. Kafadar, Asiye Hatun: Rüya mektupları, 26-39 (repr. in Idem, Kim var imi , 137-149);A. Niyazioğlu, “Ottoman Sufi Sheiks Between This World and the Hereafter: A Study ofNev’izâde ‘Atâ’î’s (1583-1635) Biographical Dictionary”, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, HarvardUniversity, 2003, 195ff, 205ff, 224ff; see also A. Georgieva, “Dreams as Messages from theOther World: Insights into Two Balkan Local Cultures”, in G. Valtchinova (ed.), Religion and


22/26

M. SARIYANNIS 216

contain cases of necromancy (in the literal sense, i.e. divination by contact with thespirits of the dead), in which one visits a saint’s or a great poet’s grave and finds a

solution to his problem, usually through a dream.64

However, this was always adubious practice, and the seventeenth-century Kadızadeli movement deniedvehemently that asking any spiritual assistance or intercession from the dead couldbe permissible.65 Thus, it is not surprising that a fetva of the early eighteenth centuryorders the punishment of someone who claimed to contact the dead in the cemeteriesby way of magic, by making their relatives prostrating themselves toward thegrave.66

If Zeyd goes to a grave and says to some people, “Come and I will bring younews from the grave; prostrate yourselves humbly a hundred times toward

the grave”, and makes several men prostrate toward this grave, what shouldhappen to him?

Answer: He must be punished by as many strokes as the kadi judges (ta’zir )and prohibited of doing so.

At any rate, there is a certain vagueness in the theological views the Ottomansinherited about the fate of the dead. A passage from al-Ghazali (1058-1111)indicates that some dead people’s spirits “wander around the realm below the earthly(or lowest) heaven”; on the other hand, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzîya (d. 1350) admits that

the question of the locality of the spirits of the dead before resurrection is debatable,and concludes that they are placed in various places of Heaven and Hell, while al-Suyuti (d. 1505) argues that punishable souls are “too busy with their punishmentsto be doing anything else”.67 This vagueness continued well into Ottoman culture.68 As Edhem Eldem notes (and in contrast with the distressed dead of the first Cinanistory), “one of the vaguest and most ambiguous concepts in Ottoman funerary

Boundaries. Studies from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Turkey (Istanbul 2010), 187-192 for

modern observations.64 Aksoyak (ed.), Kefeli Hüseyin: Râznâme, 52-53, 194; Niyazioğlu, “Ottoman Sufi Sheiks”,

205ff; cf. Fahd, La divination arabe, 174ff. Through the denial of the possibility of actualrevival of dead people’s spirits, in the Middle Ages the term “necromancy” came to denotemagic through invocation of demons (Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 152-153).

65 See e.g. S. Çavuoğlu, “The Kâdîzâdeli Movement: An Attempt of erî’at-Minded Reform inthe Ottoman Empire”, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University 1990, 302-307;Niyazioğlu, “Ottoman Sufi Sheiks”, 211-214; cf. Kâtib Çelebi, Mîzânü’l-hak fi ihtiyâri’l-âhak (Konstantiniyye 1306/1888), 76-81.

66 Tualp, “Treating Outlaws and Registering Miscreants”, 72. This fetva belongs to MenteizadeAbdurrahim Efendi, who was a eyhülislam in 1715-1716.

67 See the detailed description of the course between death and final resurrection according toauthorities such as al-Ghazali or Abu Layth al-Samarkandi in Smith – Haddad, Death and

Resurrection, 31-61 and especially 50ff. on intercourse between the living and the dead (p. 52for al-Ghazali’s passage; 54 on al-Suyuti; 56-59 on Ibn Qayyim).

68 Cf. Yazıcıoğlu, Le Kalâm et son rôle, 170-172, 315.


23/26


culture seems to have been the interval between death and the ultimateresurrection… Particularly in funerary epitaphs […] most wishes and prayers for the

deceased are concerned with paradise rather than with the intermediary phase of lifein the grave”.69 On the other hand, a body does not necessarily need to be dead in order for its

soul to come out: Evliya Çelebi conveys a charming story about the soul (nefs) ofSultan Bayezid II coming out of his mouth in the form of a weasel, in order to taste asoup in the time of fasting, a story that brings to mind some descriptions of the Benandante wizards of Friuli. Purportedly, when the Sultan ordered the killing of hisgreedy soul, the eyhülislam stated that it should be buried like a full human being,and “that is why Bayezid is said to have been buried twice”.70 In another, more

islamicized version, a Sufi might experience insilâh, i.e. the stripping of his soulfrom his body to reach “the incorporeal realm of the divine universe”.71 Of course,such beliefs have clear shamanistic connotations and can be traced back either toCentral Asian religions or to the Manichaean contrast between matter and spirit, ananalysis that is out of place in this paper.72

At any rate, thus, the existence of ghosts does not seem acceptable in theOttoman Islam, and it seems that this is reflected in the relevant vocabulary as well.Indeed, the word hortlak which today means “ghost” is a neologism; only in thebeginnings of the nineteenth century we find the verb hortlamak with the meaning of

“coming out of the grave”. Even toward the end of the century, Sir James Redhousegives this time a very careful definition: “A corpse supposed to snort or groan in itsgrave from supernatural torture; a kind of vampire or ghost”.73 An Ottoman sourcedescribing folk beliefs of the late nineteenth century notes that ghosts were namedhortlak or vampir , and that they were mostly appearing in Edirne (where people

69 E. Eldem, Death in Istanbul. Death and its Rituals in Ottoman-Islamic Culture (Istanbul 2005),46.

70 Gökyay ed., Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 1, 140. Evliya adds a similar story on Bayezid

(Abu Yazid) Bistamî, the famous ninth-century Sufi; contrary to the Sultan, who had his soulkilled and then experienced all kinds of defeats and miseries, Bistamî let it back in. On the soulcoming out of the living body in the form of a mouse in the Benandante confessions, seeGinzburg, Les batailles nocturnes, 39; on the more general folklore motive throughout Europesee Idem, Ecstasies, 138-139.

71 Niyazioğlu, “Ottoman Sufi Sheiks”, 215-224. A passage on such an experience, where a sheikh“informed his disciples that when he does not move himself for three days, they should notthink that he is dead, but know that he is in a state of insilâh” (ibid., 216 fn. 339) is strikinglysimilar to various descriptions of shamanistic origin recorded all over Eurasia in Ginsburg,Ecstasies, 139, 170 and passim.

72 Cf. H. Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. From Mazdean Iran to Shî’ite Iran

(Princeton 1977).73 The word is attested in Vâsıf Osman Bey’s poetry (d. 1824), and found its way to the

dictionaries after the mid-nineteenth century (neither Kieffer and Bianchi, nor Zenker record it).See Tietze, Türkiye türkçesi lugatı, v. II (Wien 2009), 326, s.v. “hortla-“;http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=hortlak; Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon, 872.


24/26

M. SARIYANNIS 218

called them hortlak ) and Manastır (Bitola), where, the author notes, they were calledvampir .74

Conclusion: Conceptions of the Supernatural

If we may reach a conclusion from all this scattered evidence, it could perhaps focusin the place of the supernatural element in the Ottoman understanding of the worldand the ways the exponents of scientific knowledge, be it rational or traditional,confronted this element.75 Now, describing the notions and categories of the“marvelous” in the Ottoman culture would surpass both the scope of this paper andthe capacities of its author; only a few short notes can be made as an initiative forfurther discussion.

To begin with, as far as I can tell there is no word for the “supernatural” inclassical Ottoman, and one could argue that even the very notion is absent, since thenotion of “nature” is very near to that of “God”, and (as the latter is omnipotent)there is no extraordinary event that cannot be potentially true. As AnnemarieSchimmel notes, in Islamic theology “[t]he general term for anything extraordinaryis khâriq ul-‘âda, ‘what tears the custom’ (of God); i.e., when God wants to disruptthe chain of cause and result to which we are accustomed”.76 (And here we mustnote again that in this paper there was no mention of the “saintly” marvelous orsupernatural, which of course abounds in Ottoman literature and hagiology and

could be the subject of an article –indeed, of a book—at its own right.)

77

Following

74 Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı âdet, merasim ve tabirleri. Đ nsanlar, inanı lar, e ğ lence, dil, eds K.Arısan – D. Arısan Günay (Istanbul 1995), II, 374. See also ibid., 420 (hortlak in a glossary ofpopular expressions) and 441 (hortlasın as a kind of curse).

75 On this distinction (rational, al-‘ulûm al-‘akliyya, vs. traditional or “transmitted” sciences, al-‘ulûm al-nakliyya) see B. Tezcan, “Some Thoughts on the Politics of Early Modern OttomanScience”, in D. Quataert – B. Tezcan (eds), Beyond Dominant Paradigms in Ottoman and

Middle Eastern/North African Studies. A Tribute to Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj (Istanbul 2010), 135-

156, at 138. If we had more material on Ottoman magic and sorcery (a project some otherscholar might hopefully undertake), we might compare these attitudes and their (hypothetical)development to the interesting pattern of development Tezcan proposes in this article.

76 Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 206 and cf. EI 2, s.v. “Karâma” (L. Gardet).77 See e.g. E. G. Ambros – J. Schmidt, ‘A Cossack Adopted by the Forty Saints: An Original

Ottoman Story in the Leiden University Library’, in Kermeli –Özel (eds), Myths, Realities and‘Black Holes’, 297-324, or any of the published menakıbnâmes of Sufi saints: for instance, H.Đnalcık, “Dervish and Sultan: An Analysis of the Otman Baba Vilâyetnâmesi”, in Smith – Ernst(eds), Manifestations of Sainthood , 209-223; A. Y. Ocak, Türk halk inançlarında veedebiyatında evliyâ menkabeleri (Ankara 1983); Idem, Kütlür tarihi kayna ğ ı olarakmenakıbnameler. Metodolojik bir yakla ım (Ankara 1992); Niyazioğlu, “Ottoman Sufi Sheiks”,

95-101, 215ff.; a relatively late example is Enfî Hasan Hulûs Halvetî, “Tezkiretü’l- Müteahhirîn”. XVI.-XVIII. Asırlarda Đ stanbul Velîleri ve Delileri, eds M. Tatcı – M. Yıldız(Istanbul 2007). Sufi authors had a special interest in narrating their own (or their teachers’)visionary experiences and miracles, as they thus established their authority as “the preeminentmasters of the time”: D. Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of the Times: Sufi


25/26


their Arabian and Persian predecessors, the Ottomans would rather speak of the“marvelous”, which as a mental category played a major role in the medieval

imagination, both in East and West. As defined by al-Kazvini (1203-1283), author ofa very well-known collection of mirabilia, there are “ordinary marvels” (‘acâ’ib)and “extraordinary” ones (garâ’ib); the second category includes both the miraclesof Prophets and saints and the works of demons, as well as magic, divination, andother man-driven occult phenomena.78 In both senses, it is evident that themarvelous is present in the Ottoman folklore and literature; what has to beincorporated somehow by “scientific” authors (I take the term to mean authors forwhom, in this context, abnormal events can be tolerated only within the confines ofreligion) is that part of the marvelous which concerns the Hereafter (while they tend

to be more skeptical as far as it concerns mythological geography or zoology, forinstance). This happens because such “marvelous” events can be reconciled with theofficial theological/cosmological frame; moreover, and contrary to mythicalgeographies and other “ordinary marvels” according to al-Kazvini’s categorization,such events are not affected by scientific progress, especially since the existence ofthe jinn is fully accepted. (On the other hand, and especially with a view to the stateresponse, the manipulation of cases related to the supernatural might be used inorder to enhance the power of religious authorities.) It is to be noted, for instance,that mythical places described as such in aca’ib-style co

ghosts vampires and sorcerers-libre

Documents