Meriç’ten Mostar’a şiirlerde Rumeli köprüleri
From Marica to Mostar: Rumelian bridges in poetry

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes stone bridges on Balkan rivers, explores and comments the poems about them. There is a legend that Turks crossed the Marmara Sea by rafts. The Ottomans, who crossed Gallipoli for conquest and first made a small state and then an Empire, arrived in the Balkans through bridges. Every bridge built on the great rivers, which were crossed, gave a stamp to that area and the city. From the capital to the farthest point of the Empire, imposing stone bridges on rivers were built as an artistic-aesthetic monument, but also to enable the needs for military transport. Several bridges built on major Balkan rivers as symbols of abundance and blessings, such as the Mostar Bridge, Soqullu’s Bridge on Drina, the Stone Bridge in Skopje, the Meric and Tunca Bridges in Edirne, have become the subject of classical poetry, shehr-engizs, chronograms in verse or prose works and travelogues. These bridges, through imagination and descriptions, became places where lovers went out for evening walks or met there, while in another context, through comparisons and metaphors, they would be compared to the stature of the lover, the sky, the Milky Way in space or the afterlife bride (sirat kopru). These bridges were so magnificent that they could accommodate the firmament in every eye and could look like a large belt that has the power to connect two hills.

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