In June 1444, emissaries of the Hungarian king Ladislaus arrived in the then-Ottoman capital of Edirne to meet with Sultan Murad II. A treaty was agreed by which the Ottomans relaxed their hold on certain Balkan lands and the Hungarians undertook not to fight them for the next 10 years. Considering the balance of power at the time between the two sides, these were generous terms on the Ottoman part. In Hungary, Ladislaus solemnly swore to abide by the treaty. However, the Pope then intervened and absolving him from his oath, encouraged him to immediately go to war with the Ottomans.
Ladislaus set out with his forces and made it as far as Varna, on the Black Sea coast. Murad enraged at this betrayal, marched his men to meet them, with, as John Julius Norwich dramatically notes, “the broken treaty pinned to his standard.” That was not all that was to be broken on the day the two sides came to battle. Ladislaus and his forces were thoroughly defeated and the Hungarian king himself was slain. As Norwich puts it “the last Crusade ever to be launched against the Turks in Europe had ended in catastrophe.” It opened up the whole of southeastern Europe to Ottoman control and allowed for Hungary itself to be conquered in the following century by Suleiman the Magnificent.
The Battle of Varna would not seem to augur positive future Turkish-Hungarian relations, but history does not always progress in predictable ways. Following the period of Ottoman control of Hungary, the Austrian Habsburgs took over. So, by the 19th century, when Hungarian patriots who wished for the freedom of their country rose against the Habsburgs, they had a common enemy with the Ottoman Empire. It was in such a rising in 1848-9 that the Hungarian poet Sandor Petöfi, a local exhibition on who is mentioned in the latest installment of Buse Keskin’s revelatory Istanbul’s consulate chronicles, was killed. The leader of the uprising and the best-known of the Hungarian national leaders, Lajos Kossuth, being forced to flee his homeland, took temporary refuge in the Turkish city of Kütahya.
Hungarian-Turkish relations were also improved by nationalism becoming a dominant ideology in the modern period. It caused people to look to their origins as being key to their identity, which led to a closening of feeling between Hungarians and Turks as both originated in Central Asia.
This brings us to the 21st of the Famous Travellers to Türkiye series. It is Bela Bartok (1881-1945) the Hungarian composer and musicologist, as he came to Türkiye in 1936 to explore the common Hungarian-Turkish heritage. In terms of the series, my intention has been to complete it at 23 travelers but to beg an indulgence of a different kind from the reader for each of the final three. For Bartok, I would like to be granted an indulgence of my ignorance. For while I feel I have a competent understanding of the written and pictorial arts, my understanding of music is slight, and as such I cannot evaluate Bartok in the way he deserves. However, I still wanted to include him, not only because my musical ignorance does not prevent me from outlining his visit, but also because I think he is a figure worthy of being introduced to those who may not have heard of him or do not know of his connection to Türkiye.
My own interest in Bartok, of whom I previously knew next to nothing, was sparked by an intriguing comment in a book on Hungarian history by Istvan Lazar who declares that “it is possible that posterity will judge Bela Bartok to be the greatest Hungarian of the twentieth century.” In the arts, I am more familiar with, Hungary in the 20th century punches far above its weight with brilliant writers such as Margit Kaffka, Arthur Koestler, and Magda Szabo, a masterly poetic tradition carried on from Petöfi with such poets as Endre Ady and Atilla Joszef and the wonderfully compelling pictorial art of Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka. So it would mean a great deal for the work of Bartok to outshine that of these figures.
However, Lazar does not base his claim solely on Bartok’s work. He also bases it on his character, viewing Bartok as a man of “unbending morality” and implying that Bartok sees a commonality in a suffering humanity. In order to appreciate why this is quite exceptional in his time, we can turn to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Zweig, who personally knew Bartok, describes the state of affairs in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. Zweig notes the “constant tension” between its small successor states, which “as soon as they were created ... began intriguing against each other, quarreling over tiny areas of territory” and gives the example of “Hungarians against Romanians” amongst others. In such a period, to be able to take an interest, as Bartok does, in Romanian folk music rather than simply regard that country through xenophobic eyes shows his greatness of spirit.
Janos Sipos in his book In the "Wake of Bartok" in Anatolia notes that “besides Hungarian folk music and the music of neighboring peoples, Bartok was deeply interested in the music of linguistically related ... peoples” and it is this that led him to Türkiye in 1936. Bartok’s inspiration for the trip came from his feeling that there was a link between certain Hungarian and Turkish folk music and that, in Bartok’s own words, they “derive from a common source, and this source was old north-Turkic culture.”
As for the man himself, Bela Bartok was born in 1881 in Nagyszentmiklos in Transylvania, now the Romanian town of Sannicolau Mare. He learned the piano as a child. Bereft of his father at age 9, he and his mother moved to what is now Bratislava in 1893, though then, as with Transylvania, it was also part of the Hungarian domains. In 1899, he moved to Budapest to be a music student.
The basis for two parts of what Alan Dundes calls Bartok’s “triple career” was thus established – pianist and composer – indeed, he was soon to compose a very popular work on Kossuth. The third part was unexpected, though. Zoltan Kodaly, Bartok’s chief collaborator, said of him that “at the beginning of his career he would not even have dreamt that he would become a folklorist.” However, Bartok reveals how this interest fortuitously came to him. As a recent graduate of the Hungarian Academy of Music, in 1904 he was composing in a villa in the north of Hungary when he overheard a nursemaid singing a strange-sounding song, and he then listened to more such traditional airs. What struck Bartok was how different these were from the songs of urban Hungary. He felt that what he had discovered, as he himself put it, “pointed the way to unlimited possibilities” so he resolved that he “would follow this path, after suitable preparation.” It led him to go out and collect Hungarian folk music. Eventually, in 1934, his interest even led him to resign from the Academy of Music where he had taught since 1907 in order to focus on it full-time. As has been made clear above, this interest was not limited to the folk music of Hungary though. Bartok himself stated that “I am interested not only in Hungarian folk songs but in the peasant music of all nationalities.” His work involved his rendering of this music into a publishable version, and to further develop a system for classifying folk music which had been invented by Ilmari Krohn.
In 1935, Bartok’s fellow Hungarian, Laszlo Rasonyi, who held a position at Ankara University, invited Bartok to come and visit the country. An official Turkish invitation was also extended to Bartok to come to the capital in order to lecture on folk music. The following summer, in preparation for his trip Bartok set himself to the study of Turkish, though he found it hard going.
Bartok arrived in Istanbul in November 1936. There, he receives the support of the Turkish composer and music expert Ahmet Adnan Saygun who assists him as an interpreter and works with him on the annotation of texts. Bartok visits the Municipal Conservatory of Music in Istanbul. He listens to recordings of folk music that they hold, but, as Bartok’s biographer David Cooper notes, “he discovered that these had been unsystematically selected and lacked written versions of the texts.” Bartok also feels the collection is problematic in that it had been recorded by wandering musicians who lack deep-rooted connections to specific sites. He then travels to Ankara, where he gives lectures to the Halkevi as well as performing a piano concert. However, he also falls ill and this affects his itinerary. After some days, however, Bartok is able to set off southward as a part of a party made up of himself, Saygun and two members of the Ankara Music School, Necil Kazim and Ulvi Cemal. They pass through Adana and Mersin to get to Osmaniye. Although since 1996, Osmaniye has been a separate province of the Republic of Türkiye, at the time of Bartok’s visit it was part of the province of Adana. This is not the only change that has occurred there since the mid-1930s. Bartok describes Osmaniye as “a large village,” though it today has a population of more than a quarter of a million people.
Bartok is technologically equipped to collect his folk songs as he has come prepared with a phonograph, though this was unable to record singing and instruments simultaneously. This is not the only problem the party faces, though. As Cooper notes, similarly to other places “Bartok had varying success in finding individuals who were willing to sing for them.” However, one person who lacks any reluctance in providing Bartok with evidence of his musical prowess is an old man of 70 named Bekir. Bartok relates that:
"He began to sing a tune for us in the courtyard without hesitation. It was an old narrative that he sang, about some war of the old days. I could hardly believe my ears, for it sounded just like a variant of an old Hungarian tune."
This old man then sings another that sounds similar to old Hungarian music, and by this Bartok professes himself “amazed.” He is overjoyed to have found what he has been looking for. Unsurprisingly, considering the time of year in which he visits, the weather causes problems for his mobility, especially considering the state of most roads at that time. However, his group eventually reaches the nomadic Tecirli at Tüysüz. They are initially reluctant to sing for this strange outsider but eventually, they are persuaded to do so.
Bartok returned to Hungary with the material of 87 melodies he had accumulated. Being a perfectionist, he was disappointed with what he had done, though others may regard his fieldwork as having been an amazing achievement. What Bartok felt keenly was that he had failed to trace the origins of the songs, and he was also unable to get anyone to sing together but was unable to establish definitively whether Turks never traditionally sang in chorus. He had also been unable to get a woman to sing for him.
Bartok continued his collaboration with Saygun to produce Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor. At the beginning of the New Year, Bartok had amazingly already completed the transcription of around a quarter of the collected songs. He himself says of this work that it was “a most exhausting task, but at the same time, most interesting.” Bartok’s dedication to accuracy meant that he annotated his work so thoroughly that, as Cooper says “some tunes become virtually unreadable,” and he even created 20 different categories in which to sort this small selection of music. Bartok was, however, able to draw a highly significant conclusion from what he had collected. He asserted that some of the material “points to a common Western-Central Asiatic origin of both Turkish and Hungarian materials, and determines their age as of being at least 15 centuries old.”
In 1938, Bartok was deeply disturbed when Nazi Germany ended Austrian independence, which incidentally rendered Zweig stateless. When Bartok’s mother died and World War II broke out the following year, he determined to leave Hungary and began what Alan Dundes describes as his “long journey from Budapest into exile in the United States,” where he arrived in 1940. He died of leukemia there five years later.
Bartok’s work on Turkish music was not to be published until after his death. However, it is to be noted that the trip not only led Bartok to draw evidence-based conclusions concerning the relationship between certain folk music in Hungary and Türkiye, but it also affected the music that Bartok himself composed. Cooper avers from the varied collections in countries including Türkiye that “the development of Bartok’s compositional style traces out the interactions and interpenetration of these fundamental resources.”
The trip has also been physically recognized in Osmaniye with the Bela Bartok Memorial Museum. I had intended to visit this place in person in preparation for this article but unfortunately learned that the damage caused by the terrible earthquake back in February has meant that this building is currently closed.
To end, I would like two examples of songs collected by Bartok in Osmaniye, the rendering of them into modern Turkish and the translations, which I have slightly amended where necessary, belonging to Sipos’s book. The first is a love song, though there is more than a hint of child marriage within it:
"Everybody has his sweetheart with him, ("Herkes sevdiğini yanına getirdi,")
"Lounge along and stay in front of me, o my graceful violet." ("Sallan, geç karşıma, nazlı menekşem.")
"O little bride who is coming along towards me," ("Anacından gelen küçücük gelin,")
"Can you remain a full hour before me?" ("Bir saat karşımda durabilir misin?")
"You are the desire of my foolish heart," ("Divane gönlümün tâlibi sensin,")
"My wings are broken, can you bind them?" ("Kırıldı kanadım, sarabilir misin?")
And, traditional Turkish fatalism is poignantly and tersely expressed in this lament:
"Listen to me o sirs," ("Dinleyin ağalar benim sözümü,")
"My cousin is like a rose in the Sultan’s gardens." ("Has bahçe içinde gül emmim oğlu.")
"My cousin is driving away his cart," ("Emmim oğlu arabasını çekmiş gidiyor,")
"This accident happened by God’s will." ("Bu kazayı Allahtan, bil emmim oğlu.")
