For every Atatűrk, Turkey needs at least one Karagőz (black eye, after his one large black pupil). Karagőz is the main character in a tradition of shadow puppet theatre (itself named ‘Karagőz’) unique to Turkey and, in earlier times, to the areas influenced by the Ottoman empire. Although there is debate about how the shadow puppet technique began in Turkey, it most probably arrived from India with performers and traders who also introduced it as far east as Indonesia.
Because I can’t resist a puppet show, one of my Turkey journey regrets will be to have just missed a Karagőz performance in Bursa, where there is a small and declining community of shadow puppet affectionados. The closest we came to Karagőz was to visit this community’s small museum, with its samples of shadow and other puppets, and its celebrations of the theatre tradition, its practitioners and historians.
The first shadow puppet performance we saw was in Jogyakarta, Java – there called wayang (shadow) kulit (skin or hide, from which the flat puppet figures are cut). The puppets there were generally larger than in Karagőz, and the stories based largely on episodes adapted from Hindu epics like the Ramayana, itself a sprawling narrative that includes satiric elements but whose overarching narrative moves in opposite directions from Karagőz’s anti-establishment, satirical playfulness. The displays at the Bursa museum, including Indonesian puppets, brought back memories of that dimly-lit room in Jogyakarta, the semi-circle of gamelan players, the Javanese attention to ritual and ceremony, the women’s chorus, the puppeteer whose story unfolded as he lifted each puppet so deftly from hand to hand behind the screen, the characters’ argumentative-sounding chatter (we didn’t understand a word so are by no means fair to performance) that rose and fell in intensity but still seemed exaggerated and melodramatic to our senses … the whole like some ancient prophecy of the earliest forms of cinema.
Here in Turkey, I have read, Karagőz has been a theatre of laughter and subversion, even through the Ottoman Empire. Verbal comment and counter-comment, gesture, slapstick, concealment and disguise, the surreal and magical: all these things are vehicles for how Karagőz repeatedly undercuts pretence, hypocrisy, fake learning and appeals to the status quo and official authority. The stories, which apparently were once well-known and much repeated, seem to have their origins in folk-oral performance traditions where the precise characters might change but the core of the action remained constant: the ‘little’ man questioning, undercutting, deflating the powers that be, even if sometimes unintentionally or while becoming a fool himself. Within the world of the Ottoman empire, Karagőz continued as an independent folk tradition and sometimes puppeteers were persecuted. Apparently the tradition was also co-opted into acceptable courtly forms and sometimes used as a weapon in court politics.
In Karagőz two characters stand at the centre of the action, with a variety of stock characters also appearing, depending on the story. There’s Karagőz himself: pug-nosed, bushy-bearded, impulsive and free-speaking (sometimes apparently naively and stupidly so), always unemployed, always on the lookout for some new scheme to provide for his family, physically dynamic and expressive, open to new possibilities and the uncertain, almost always (eventually) able to outwit others, made of flesh and blood and not infrequently a target of physical abuse from which he always, magically, rises intact. Vulnerable and seemingly powerless – and often the object of audience hilarity – Karagőz unclothes pretence and assumed authority, making them the targets of even greater laughter.
On the other side is the smooth-tongued, seemingly erudite, calculating Hacivat, reciter of poems, a shallow but wide well of facts, like someone who’s starred in a Trivial Pursuit training course, and a character who routinely sides with the status quo. In story after story, so I understand, the subversive spirit of the narrative rests with Karagőz, whatever he might do or not do to achieve such an outcome.
A footnote: Now back in Istanbul, we have today visited the Great Blue Mosque and are again surrounded by monumental palaces, Sophia’s great dome and vaults, ever-grander mosques, each emperor and sultan and their architects evidently needing to outdo their predecessors’ towering erections. Yes, they do get me: I do feel awe, and an appealing attraction, in the face of such beauty and grandeur. But I have also imagined joining Karagőz and Hacivat on a walking tour through these same structures – it would be boisterous, argumentative, and joke-filled – and wonder how these same celebrated erections might then be experienced and understood with such characters as guides.
Because I can’t resist a puppet show, one of my Turkey journey regrets will be to have just missed a Karagőz performance in Bursa, where there is a small and declining community of shadow puppet affectionados. The closest we came to Karagőz was to visit this community’s small museum, with its samples of shadow and other puppets, and its celebrations of the theatre tradition, its practitioners and historians.
The first shadow puppet performance we saw was in Jogyakarta, Java – there called wayang (shadow) kulit (skin or hide, from which the flat puppet figures are cut). The puppets there were generally larger than in Karagőz, and the stories based largely on episodes adapted from Hindu epics like the Ramayana, itself a sprawling narrative that includes satiric elements but whose overarching narrative moves in opposite directions from Karagőz’s anti-establishment, satirical playfulness. The displays at the Bursa museum, including Indonesian puppets, brought back memories of that dimly-lit room in Jogyakarta, the semi-circle of gamelan players, the Javanese attention to ritual and ceremony, the women’s chorus, the puppeteer whose story unfolded as he lifted each puppet so deftly from hand to hand behind the screen, the characters’ argumentative-sounding chatter (we didn’t understand a word so are by no means fair to performance) that rose and fell in intensity but still seemed exaggerated and melodramatic to our senses … the whole like some ancient prophecy of the earliest forms of cinema.
Here in Turkey, I have read, Karagőz has been a theatre of laughter and subversion, even through the Ottoman Empire. Verbal comment and counter-comment, gesture, slapstick, concealment and disguise, the surreal and magical: all these things are vehicles for how Karagőz repeatedly undercuts pretence, hypocrisy, fake learning and appeals to the status quo and official authority. The stories, which apparently were once well-known and much repeated, seem to have their origins in folk-oral performance traditions where the precise characters might change but the core of the action remained constant: the ‘little’ man questioning, undercutting, deflating the powers that be, even if sometimes unintentionally or while becoming a fool himself. Within the world of the Ottoman empire, Karagőz continued as an independent folk tradition and sometimes puppeteers were persecuted. Apparently the tradition was also co-opted into acceptable courtly forms and sometimes used as a weapon in court politics.
In Karagőz two characters stand at the centre of the action, with a variety of stock characters also appearing, depending on the story. There’s Karagőz himself: pug-nosed, bushy-bearded, impulsive and free-speaking (sometimes apparently naively and stupidly so), always unemployed, always on the lookout for some new scheme to provide for his family, physically dynamic and expressive, open to new possibilities and the uncertain, almost always (eventually) able to outwit others, made of flesh and blood and not infrequently a target of physical abuse from which he always, magically, rises intact. Vulnerable and seemingly powerless – and often the object of audience hilarity – Karagőz unclothes pretence and assumed authority, making them the targets of even greater laughter.
On the other side is the smooth-tongued, seemingly erudite, calculating Hacivat, reciter of poems, a shallow but wide well of facts, like someone who’s starred in a Trivial Pursuit training course, and a character who routinely sides with the status quo. In story after story, so I understand, the subversive spirit of the narrative rests with Karagőz, whatever he might do or not do to achieve such an outcome.
A footnote: Now back in Istanbul, we have today visited the Great Blue Mosque and are again surrounded by monumental palaces, Sophia’s great dome and vaults, ever-grander mosques, each emperor and sultan and their architects evidently needing to outdo their predecessors’ towering erections. Yes, they do get me: I do feel awe, and an appealing attraction, in the face of such beauty and grandeur. But I have also imagined joining Karagőz and Hacivat on a walking tour through these same structures – it would be boisterous, argumentative, and joke-filled – and wonder how these same celebrated erections might then be experienced and understood with such characters as guides.
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