AN EDUCATION IN ERZNKA

Abstract

Chapter 7 brings together the three major threads of the book thus far: the drive to adapt the poetic styles of ‘others,’ the need to enforce local religious boundaries, and the creation of corresponding (or affinitive) literary cultures across multiple languages, capable of resonating with diverse peoples. By focusing on Kostandin Erznkats‘i, an Armenian poet in Erznka (Erzincan) who adapted Firdawsi’s Shah-nama, it returns to the complex dynamic between author and audience with which this book began. As it shows, this reciprocal relationship, which produced a literary field, reflects an ongoing dialogue that continued long after poems were composed. It was therefore not enough to create a new literary culture: the poets of thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Anatolia were also tasked with creating a reading public, and an interpretive mode, that would generate new meaning long after composition came to an end. In a tangible manner, literary works, and the audiences who consumed them, served to produce one another.