Destan Evreninde Terör, Terörizm ve Terörist: Anakronik Bir Sözlü Kültür Okuma Denemesi
Representations of “Terror”, “Terrorism” and “Terrorist” in the Epic World: An Anachronical Reading Attempt of Oral Culture

Summary/Abstract: The present study claims that traditional narratives shape social behaviour patterns and that there are significant traces in the narratives about a society's attitudes to certain phenomena. It promises to analyse this claim through terrorism and the example of the epic world. An anachronistic reading attempt has emerged to coherently prove this claim, as the attempt to analyse a phenomenon such as terrorism (a contemporary problem) through past epics is inherently anachronistic. Therefore, this article presents an original method of analysis to researchers on how one can use traditional narratives to analyse terrorism. In this study, we carried out this assessment through samples from two Turkic epics: epic of Oguz Kagan and the Book of Dede Korkut. The presentation of terrorism in the Turkic epics has been studied in detail through the actions of each epics’ characters and narrative episodes through the general principles of structuralism – thus revealing the structural scheme of the character actions and episodes as they relate to terrorism. We have discussed our findings in the context of the fictionalization of reality and the realization of fiction to give our study versatility and comprehensiveness.

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