Mehmet Behçet Perim’in Şiirlerinde Millî Kimlik ve Kültür Unsurları

Abstract

The period in which the Balkan Wars were experienced is a period when national identities were recognized, and national states began to form. The uprisings and land losses in the early 1900s, which were a turning point in Turkish political history, made it necessary to define a new native country and in this context strengthened the belief in the power of national identity, memory, and consciousness. During the depressing times of nations and states, literature and intellectuals assumed important responsibilities for the envision of a new native country, the construction of identity and the establishment of national consciousness. Mehmet Behcet Perim, one of the important representatives of Turkish literature in Bulgaria, known for his poet, writer, and journalist identities, has also written works in almost all genres of literature as the voice and conscience of the nation to which he belongs; he is a literary figure who fought for the Bulgarian Turks to unite around an ideal. The literary and intellectual works he wrote are remarkable texts in terms of cultural elements such as language, literature, art, history, belief, geography. This article aims to reveal how the elements of national culture are handled in the process of the construction of national identity in the context of the past, state, and future, based on Mehmet Behcet’s poems collected in the book Gecit Ver Kamci, through the concepts of identity, history / tradition, belief, place / geography and education.