Variants of “Koroglu” Epos with Common and Different Features

Abstract

Epics of Turkish oral literature are larger in volume than other folklore genres. These works have brought great historical events and heroism to the present day in an artistic language. From this point of view, one of the epics in the memory of Turks and dozens of neighboring peoples is “Koroglu” epos. The period of formation of the saga is ancient and its area of distribution is very wide. Therefore, the saga is divided into two major versions, and there are about five hundred vari-ants. The branches belonging to the “Koroglu” variants and versions have gone through a long his-torical process and spread over a wide area from Central Asia to Central Europe - to the banks of the Danube, from Siberia to Africa - to the shores of the Mediterranean. In this sense, the “Koroglu” epos, a Eurasian epos, is one of our well-known and spoken monuments in almost all Turkic tribes and among the neighboring Arab, Armenian, Kurdish, Tajik, Georgian and small peoples of the Caucasus. Since the Azerbaijani and Turkmen (Turkmenistan) versions of the “Koroglu” epos cover both versions, the study of the problems of these variants is important in terms of studying the whole epos.
This article compares the common and different features of the Azerbaijani and Turkmen ver-sions of the “Koroglu” epos, gives information about the different variants, their origin, history of development, and heroes.