[Collected by audio recording from a thirty-five year old shopkeeper named Mevlut Unal in the village of Karahamzali, district of Bala, province of Ankara, in March, 1962.]
A man had three sons but no money, and so it was necessary for his sons to work. The eldest son hired himself out to a farmer who was a köse. The agreement between them was that neither the employer nor his worker was to become angry with the other, no matter what happened. If either lost his temper over something that the other did, the angry man was to forfeit enough skin from his back to make the other a pair of sandals.
Right from the beginning the köse teased the boy in order to make him lose his temper, for he was a very mean köse. He soon succeeded in his purpose, and he took from the young man’s back enough skin for a pair of sandals. The young man quit his job in anger and the next oldest brother accepted it.
“I shall hire you,” said the köse to the second brother, “but I have certain conditions under which you must work.”
“What are they?” asked the second brother.
“You must not disturb the cream on the top of the yogurt that I give you to eat, and you must not break the edges of the yufka bread. [Yufka is a kind of unleavened bread rolled to paper thinness, placed on a circular, slightly convex steel sheet about two feet in diameter, and then baked for only a few seconds. While still hot, it is flexible and can be folded into a small bundle that looks like a handkerchief; but when it cools, it becomes very brittle, like soda crackers. It is a whole, cold and unfolded yufka that is referred to here.] You must never say, ‘I am hungry.’ If you break any of these conditions, I shall cut a piece of hide off your back large enough to make myself a pair of sandals. On the other hand, if you can make me admit that I am angry, then you can cut a piece of hide off my back large enough to make yourself a pair of sandals.”
The young man agreed to this and several days passed as he worked on the farm. Every day he became more and more hungry, however, for he found it impossible to eat. He could not get at the yogurt to eat it without disturbing the skin of cream on the top of the jar, and he could not eat the yufka without breaking its edges. As a result, he was very hungry and started to grow weak. Three days and five days passed in this manner, and the young man ate nothing at all. Finally he fell ill and lay down. The köse came to him and asked, “What is the matter?”
“Nothing,” said the young man, “except that I am starving to death.”
“All right,” answered the köse, “lie still there, and I shall take a strip of hide from your back.” The köse took enough skin from the second son’s back to make himself a pair of sandals.
The second son returned home and the youngest son, who was a keloğlan, went to the köse and asked for his job. “Very well,” said the köse, “but you must meet my conditions. Your brothers were not good workers, for the one became angry, which is forbidden on my farm, and the other complained of hunger, which is also forbidden here.”
“Are these the conditions?” asked the keloğlan.
“Yes,” said the köse, “you must never become angry with me, for if you do I shall cut enough skin from your back to make a pair of sandals. And you must never say you are hungry or I shall punish you in the same way. I shall provide plenty of food, but you must never break the skin of the yogurt or tear the edges of the yufka. On the other hand, if you can upset me and make me angry, you can take enough skin from my back to make yourself a pair of sandals.”
“Very well,” said the keloğlan, “it is a bargain.”
The keloğlan began to work for the köse. He ate the yufka by cutting a large piece from the center of it with his knife, leaving the edges intact. He ate the yogurt by breaking a hole into the bottom of the jar and sucking the yogurt through that hole. In this way, he left undisturbed the skin of cream on the top of the jar. After a week he took to the köse the heap of broken yogurt jars and asked, “Köse, are you angry with me?”
“Of course not,” answered the köse.
At the beginning of the next week the köse said to the keloğlan, “Today you will do some plowing. Take these oxen and this hound and go to that big field yonder. Plow wherever this hound lies down.”
So the keloğlan went to the field with the oxen and the hound. He spent a long while following the hound around the field, but it did not lie down anywhere. Finally it climbed up on top of a rocky mound and fell asleep there. The keloğlan climbed up to the top of the mound and kicked the dog to death. Then he returned to the köse without having done any plowing at all. He told the köse what had happened and asked him, “Are you angry with me?”
“Oh, no, of course not.”
The young man took the oxen to the stable and then went back to the köse for his next orders. “Take the oxen to the fountain to water them, but lead them out of the stable through that little window high on the back wall.”
The keloğlan went to the stable, cut the heads off the oxen, and threw the heads through the little window in the back wall. He took these heads to the fountain where he dipped them into the watering trough, whistling all the while they were there. He whistled all the while they were supposed to be drinking, just as if they had been alive. [It is a belief widely held amongst Turkish peasants that farm animals can be encouraged to drink by whistling.] Then he lifted the heads of the oxen from the trough and carried them back to the stable where he poured a bagful of hay before them. After that, he went to the köse, told him that be had watered the oxen, and invited him to come to the stable to see for himself. When the köse entered the stable, he was astonished at what he saw. He asked the keloğlan, “What did you do, boy?”
“Well,” said the keloğlan, “you asked me to take the oxen through the little window in the barn to the fountain to water them, and that is what I did. Are you angry with me for what I have done?”
“No, no—nothing of the sort,” answered the köse.
The next day the köse asked the young man to take a leg of one of the slaughtered oxen to the home of his married daughter who lived in the neighborhood. When the keloğlan appeared at the door, carrying the huge leg, the daughter feared that her father had lost an ox, and she lay down on the floor and cried. “You must be hungry,” said the keloğlan. “Here is some meat for you.” And with that, he threw the quarter of an ox on top of the woman, breaking her neck and killing her. When he returned to the köse and told him what had happened, be asked, “Are you cross with me?”
“No, not at all,” said the köse, but in fact he was gravely concerned now about what job he could safely give the keloğlan to do. “Can you tend sheep?” he asked the boy.
“Yes, of course I can,” said the keloğlan.
So the next day the keloğlan went to the pasture with the köse’s flock of sheep. After a few hours, he made a large fire in the field and put several skewers into the coals. When they were red hot, he took them out and stuck them into the of the sheeps’ anuses. In this way he killed five or six hundred of them by the end of the day.
When the köse came to the field where the sheep were all lying dead, he asked, “What is the matter with them?”
“They are tired and they are just resting. Isn’t that all right? Are you angry at me?”
“No, I am not angry. Why should I be?” But, of course, the köse was angry and he wanted to find a way to be able to cut a piece from the back of the keloğlan. Again he tried to think of some safe job for the boy to do. “Can you garden and care for fruit trees?” he asked.
“There is nothing I can do better,” said the keloğlan.
The köse gave him a forty-acre orchard to tend, but the keloğlan cut down all the trees during the first night. When the köse went to the orchard next morning, he was amazed. “What happened?” he asked.
“Why, nothing,” said the boy.
“But why are all the trees down?”
“Well, köse father, do you sleep standing up or lying down?”
“Lying down, of course.”
“So do the trees,” said the keloğlan. “They were very tired and they slept this way almost all night. When they have had enough sleep, they will awaken and stand up again.”
The next day there was a wedding in the village and the köse was invited. Before he went he asked the keloğlan to watch the front door of the house. “Watch the front door, and be on guard against thieves,” he said. But a short time after the köse had gone, the keloğlan tore the door off its hinges, strapped it to his back, and went to the wedding himself. When the köse saw him, be was surprised and asked, “What is this?”
“Well, don’t you remember? You asked me to watch the front door to guard it against thieves. I brought it with me so that I could be sure thieves did not steal it. Are you angry with me, master?”
“No, no—nothing of the sort,” said the köse, but he was by now deeply disturbed about the keloğlan’s behavior. After the wedding, he said to his wife, “Sooner or later, this young man is going to kill me. Let us run away before he does so. Bake a large bagful of çörek, and let us escape secretly tonight.”
But the young man bad overheard their conversation, and he thus discovered the köse’s plan. He got into the bag which the wife had placed by the oven for the çörek and he hid himself in the bottom. The bag was then filled with freshly baked çörek [a pastry with butter, ground nuts, and yeast kneaded into the dough] and loaded on a cart by the köse and his wife, who departed quietly at midnight. After the cart had gone for some distance, the keloğlan had to urinate, and he couldn’t wait any longer. When the köse noticed the wet spot in the cart, he said to his wife. “You must have put a great amount of butter in those çörek. It is oozing out.”
“Of course I did,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave any of the butter for that keloğlan.”
A little farther on they were beset by a number of fierce dogs which surrounded their cart and barked loudly at them. The köse’s children cried, and the köse himself was quite frightened. “Now I wish that the keloğlan were here, for he would protect us from these beasts.”
Overhearing this, the keloğlan cried out, “I am here, Uncle köse!” They helped him out of the bag in which be had been hiding, and in a short time he drove off the dogs.
After a while they came to a river bank where they decided to spend the night. After they had eaten their dinner, one of the children had to urinate. The köse’s wife said to the keloğlan, “Keloghlan, take this child and ‘burst’ him.” [The Turkish word is patlamak,with a local, secondary meaning as a euphemism for “take a child to toilet.”]
The keloğlan took the child into the nearby woods and dropped a large rock on him, thus bursting him. He returned to the river bank without the child and told the köse and his wife what he had done. While they went to look for the child’s body, the keloğlan took from their chest one of the wife’s gowns and hid it. After everyone else had fallen asleep, the keloğlan got up and put on the woman’s gown. He carefully lifted the sleeping wife over into his bed, and then be crawled into her bed. Imitating the woman’s voice, he said quietly, “Köse! Wake up! Let us pick up that damned keloğlan and throw him into the river, bed and all. Then we shall be rid of him.”
Half asleep, the köse got up, and he and the keloğlan threw the woman into the river in the keloğlan’s bed. It was only after his wife was lost in the water that the köse realized what had happened. He began crying.
“Why are you crying?” asked the keloğlan. “Are you angry with me?”
“Of course I am angry with you! You have killed my oxen. You have ruined my flock and cut down my orchard. And now you have destroyed my family. Why shouldn’t I be angry with you?”
Hearing this, the keloğlan cut a piece of skin from the köse’s back and made a pair of sandals with the skin. In the morning, he put on the new sandals and started walking toward a nearby town. But the köse had reached the town first, and he had hired several men to kill the keloğlan. They began to chase the keloğlan. The boy fled until he came to a shepherd with his flock of sheep. “Why are you running away from those men?” asked the shepherd.
“I refused to marry the padishah’s daughter, and they are trying to catch me to force me to marry her.”
“Why should anyone run away from that?” asked the shepherd. “I should be happy to marry the padishah’s daughter!”
“Well, if you put on my clothes and let me put on your shepherd’s clothes and heavy felt coat, they may catch you and and force you to marry her.” The shepherd agreed to this and they exchanged clothes. The shepherd pretended to be running away and the keloğlan pretended to be herding the sheep.
Shortly after this the köse and his hired men arrived at the spot. They thought that the shepherd was the keloğlan, and so they grabbed him, beat him severely, and threw him into the river. After resting for a while, they started back to the town. On the way they came upon the keloğlan dressed in sbepherd’s clothes. They were amazed to see him alive and even more amazed to see him with a flock of about forty sheep. “Where did you get these sheep?” asked the köse.
“I found this flock in the river where you dumped me. If you would throw your men into the river, they could each get forty sheep in the same way I did.”
When the köse heard this, he threw his men, one after another, into the river. As they were drowning, they made a gurgling noise in their throats, “Kirk! Kirk! Kirk!” [kirk in Turkish means ‘forty’].
“You see!” said the keloğlan. “Your friends are shouting ’Forty! Forty! Forty!’ to you. Why don’t you jump in and help them pull all those sheep out of the water?”
After the köse had been drowned with his men, the keloğlan gathered his flock and started to drive them toward his father’s home.
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[Keloğlan and köse appear in many Turkish folktales, having everywhere the same essential characters seen in the foregoing narrative.The polyracine word kel-oğlan means bald (kel) boy (oğlan), but it is a particular kind of baldness referred to here, kel indicating hairlessness from disease. Among Turkish peasants, a variety of ringworm was very common; it was a highly contagious fungus infection that sometimes left whole families bald or partly bald. More often, however, it attacked a younger child who, in a large family, might receive little care and who would be unable to attend to its own personal hygiene. Although a sympathetic character, he is not however an object of pity; on the contrary, he is often thought to have become lucky by virtue of his malady. And so in folktales Keloğlan is usually the unpromising younger son whom fortune favors. Sometimes stupid or naive, while at other times shrewd and highly intelligent, he passes through one experience after another to win in the end. Frequently a person of high social status, the son or daughter of padishah or ruler, will be—or will pretend to be—a keloğlan in order to pass undetected among common folk. The disguise is effected by means of shabby clothes and a sheep’s stomach cleaned, dried, and stretched to cover the head tightly and thus conceal the wearer’s hair.
Köse is a counterpart to keloğlan, as consistently negative as the bald boy is positive. He is a predatory and avaricious character who makes his way in the world by treachery, craft, cruelty, and viciousness. Although human in form, he is never young—much less a child—and his origins are not told. On the literal and simplest level, Köse means a beardless man. Beardlessness occurs to some extent among all peoples, but it is a condition that seems particularly noticeable in Turkey; when the present tales were collected, the word köse was number 270 on the U.S. Army’s frequency list for spoken Turkish. The köse was not necessarily effeminate or impotent, and he was not necessarily a homosexual. In both real life and in fiction, he ordinarily married and reared a family. A heart-shaped face and short legs were thought to be secondary characteristics of the köse, though these were more matters of folk belief than fact. When one informant (Hasan Hazir of the village of Çamalan) was asked why the köse had short legs, he promptly replied, “Because all his strength goes to his head.” In Turkish folktales the character Köse was often named Musa, probably for its near rhyming with the words köse and with kîsa, meaning short.
The two character-types designated by these words in Turkish oral tradition were not however in any way uniquely Turkish, occurring widely elsewhere too, including western Europe.]