From Mahmud Kaşgari to Evliya Çelebi _{Studies in middle Turkic and Ottoman Literatures}

All the studies gathered here can be considered notes toward a literary history of the Turks. Sould such a history ever be written it will be based on the kind of spadework and microanalysis and interpretive sally offered here. They are, all of them, text-based and text-centered. If there is a scholarly discipline they share in it is philology, the attempt to understand texts in all their stunning detail as well as within their cultural and historical contexts. To the extent I have succeeded in this andeavor, I owe it to my teachers, Omeljan Pritsak and Şinasi Tekin, and to my role-model in the field of Turkish studies, Andreas Tietze, all there of whom have only recently passed away, I dedicate this book to their memory.