Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Stone People, Tree People and Animal People in Turkic Asia and Eastern Europe

2005; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0392192105055168

1467-7695

Thierry Zarcone,

Ancient Near East History

In the 17th century the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, who was visiting the Turkmen nomads from the Karakoyunlu tribe in the north-west of Iran, was extremely surprised by one of the key elements of the faith of the people, who were nonetheless Muslim: worshipping trees, beside which they lit candles and to whose bark they attached pieces of iron. Two centuries later the same astonishment can be read of in the report presented to the Ottoman sultan Abdul-hamid II by one of his agents on the topic of some nomad peoples from Anatolia in present-day Turkey; in this report it says they blindly worship ‘the great trees and monumental rocks that are touched by the first rays of the rising sun’. Ethnologists witnessed the same phenomenon in Anatolia and the Balkans in the 20th century; one of them noted that the tree cult was very much alive in the second area and even invented the neologism ‘dendrolatry’.