Crimean Tatar Folktales

Book excerpt: This volume contains Crimean Tatar folklore texts that had been collected by the noted Hungarian Turkologist Ignác Kúnos during World War I, specifically from Russian Muslim prisoners of war in Hungarian camps. The collection consists of 38 fairy tales and a partial version of the Chora-batir epic. The tales featuring padishahs, their sons, and naive boys, exhibit the enchanting diversity of Crimean Tatar folk imagination. The introductory study delves into linguistic aspects, then the next chapter explicates the transcription system’s phonetic nuances. It is followed by an English translation, which reflects Kúnos’ Hungarian translation in a much ameliorated and revised form. A sizable trilingual (Crimean Tatar–English–Russian) glossary follows covering the entire Crimean Tatar material collected by Kúnos. It becomes evident that dialectal features cannot be sharply separated across the tales since the Crimean dialects are highly mixed in character, distinguished only by the different proportions of northern (Kipchak) and southern (Oghuz) elements. The present volume, while preserving valuable pieces of Crimean Tatar folklore and offering linguistic insights, also opens a unique window into a distant time and culture.