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Pir Sultan Abdal: Encounters with Persona in Alevi Lyric Song

In his 1997 Nobel Prize lecture, Contra jogulatores obliquentes, Italian dramatist Dario Fo makes an oblique reference to a famous medieval Ottoman "jester."1 The "jester" is not mentioned by name but rather in the context of the murder of 35 artists and writers in July 1993 when religious bigots set alight the Madimak Hotel in the eastern Turkish city of Sivas.2 Those killed were there to participate in the Pir Sultan Abdal etkinlikleri (festivities).3 The "jester" Fo refers to is the eponymous identity in whose memory the festival is held, the Alevi dervish, poet, rebel, and martyr Pir Sultan Abdal. Fo's reference to the Sivas massacre was a significant statement about this incident in an international forum; but it also demonstrates the misunderstanding of the persona of Pir Sultan Abdal when refracted through time, language, and the chasm that beckons when peering askance into the opaqueness of an esoteric culture. Pir Sultan Abdal's persona, as perceived and expressed by contemporary intellectuals and artists, was fundamental to the Sivas events,4 but Fo's commendable reference gives no sense of this potent and complex persona. Indeed it even distorts and trivializes it.