COLLECTING AND ANALYZING THE LEGENDS TOLD IN AND AROUND İZMİR
Project no. 195 · Status: Kapanmış · 2017
Summary
The legends have been told and inscribed in İzmir are both the part oral folk culture of İzmir and also the reflection of the rich Turkish culture have lived in İzmir. The legends orally circulated in different locations of İzmir have not been collected, recorded and inscribed, and also there is scientific research that collected and analyzed them. Departing from that point, the main aim of this project is to safeguard and protect the legends of İzmir before they are completely forgotten, and to provide a scientific ground for them to be passed the young generations. Although there are scientific works carried on the legends related to the ancient cultures lived in İzmir and surrounding areas, but there is fieldwork collection and scientifically prepared monographic works on the legends related to later centuries and especially the Turkish era of İzmir. During the implication of this project the legends have been collected from oral narrators in 30 counties, the variants of some the legends have also been derived from written and electronic sources, and besides the legends some of the related folkloric materials such as memoires and folk beliefs are also recorded, inscribed and analyzed in accordance with the folklore methods and theories. It should be pointed that the use written and electronic sources have deliberately made in order to determine the diffusion and variation of the orally told and collected legends. The comparative method has contributed to the results of the project findings that the researchers have been able see the cross-cultural relations and its influences on the legends and as a result the cultural evolution of the legends told in İzmir. In this project number of fieldwork for collecting orally told legends have carried on, 131 number of face to face interviews have made in 30 different counties of İzmir, and more than one hundred legends, memoires and folk beliefs have collected and inscribed. During the final part of the project, some of the variants of the legends, memoires and folk beliefs are excluded and only fityfour (54) legends are determined and the texts of them provided in “Texts” part of the project results.