The Folkloric Context in Osman Zeki Özturanlı’s Stories

Abstract

Osman Zeki Özturanlı was a well-known mid-twentieth-century writer, best
recognized for his short stories. Born and raised in Söke, Özturanlı studied law in Istanbul
and worked as a lawyer in his hometown. It can be assumed that his profession as a
lawyer provided him with the opportunity to interact intensively with different types of
people in his environment. Özturanlı reflected his hometown of Söke and its surroundings,
its people, and their individual and social problems in his stories. The author vividly
describes the separate and intersecting worlds of villagers and city dwellers in settings
where the village and town appear separately or together in the same story, along with
their dialects and behavioral patterns. Osman Zeki Özturanlı’s stories reflect the changes
and transformations in Turkey between 1950 and 1970 through the lens of an Aegean
town. The changes in place, people, and society are narrated through the story’s main
characters, sometimes in a highly emotional tone.
Research on the subjects and genres of folklore, and how they are identified and
appear in literary texts, has increased in recent years. These studies, which aim to identify
the folkloric motifs and elements that constitute a literary text in terms of content and
form and to show their influences, are investigations that bring the disciplines of folklore
and literature closer together. In this study, Osman Zeki Özturanlı’s stories are examined
within the framework of folklore-literature interaction. The linguistic features that
strongly reflect the oral nature of language, such as dialectal characteristics, nicknames,
idioms, proverbs, slang, and cursing, are identified and exemplified in Özturanlı’s stories.
The use of terms related to folk beliefs, folk law, and folk medicine, which are more
prominent in the rites of passages of folklore, been identified and examined within the
context of the stories.