TEHRAN – Dada Gorgud is back to life as the Iranian audiobooks platform Avaye Chirok announced on Tuesday the release of an audiobook recounting the epic stories of the Book of Dada Gorgud.

The stories have been narrated in Azerbaijani, the book’s original language, by Bahman Vakhshour, who has previously collaborated on several other audiobooks, including “The Collection of Azerbaijani Poems of Shahriar” and “Qachaq Nabi”.

The Book of Dada Gorgud, also known as the Book of Dede Korkut or the Book of Korkut Ata, is the most famous among the epic stories of the Oghuz Turks. 

The stories carry morals and values significant to the social lifestyle of the nomadic Turkic peoples and their pre-Islamic beliefs. 

The book’s mythic narrative is part of the cultural heritage of the peoples of Oghuz Turkic origin, mainly of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

Only two manuscripts of this book, Vatican and Dresden, were known until 2018. However, a new epos was added to this book with the discovery of the Gonbad manuscript in Iran. 

The language of the Gonbad manuscript is of a mixed character and depicts vivid characteristics of the period of transition from later Old Oghuz Turkic to Early Modern Turkic of Iranian Azarbaijan. 

However, there are also orthographical, lexical and grammatical structures peculiar to Eastern Turkic, which shows that the original work was written in the area between Syrdarya and Anatolia, and later rewritten in Safavid Iran in the second half of the 16th century. 

It was later copied again in the same area in the second half of the 18th century during the Qajar period. 

The first leaf of the Gonbad manuscript is missing. For this reason, it is not known how the name of the manuscript was recorded in writing.

The epic tales of Dada Gorgud are some of the best-known Turkic legends from among a total of well over 1,000 recorded epics among the Mongolian and Turkic language families.

The book comprises twelve stories and the bulk of the work was written after the Turks converted to Islam, and the heroes are often portrayed as good Muslims while the villains are referred to as infidels, but there are also many references to the Turks’ pre-Islamic magic. 

The character Dada Gorgud, i.e. Grandfather Gorgud, is a widely renowned soothsayer and bard, and serves to link the stories together, and the thirteenth chapter of the book compiles sayings attributed to him.

Photo: A poster for the audiobook Book of Dada Gorgud. 

MMS/YAW