TURKSOY: 2014 Year of Turkmen poet Pyragy
By Nazrin Gadimova
The International Organization of Turkic Culture (TURKSOY) announced 2014 as the "Year of Magtymguly".
The nomination was announced on the occasion of the 290th anniversary of the prominent Turkmen poet and thinker Magtymguly Pyragy.
Addressing an event at Ankara's State Art and Sculpture Museum, TURKSOY Secretary General Dusein Kaseinov said the organization had dedicated the two previous years to Azerbaijan's playwright Mirza Fatali Akhundzade and Kazakh composer Mukan Tolebayev.
The goal of these activities is popularizing the culture of the Turkic world, he added.
Speaking at the event, Turkmen Culture Minister Goncha Mamedova, Secretary General of the Turkish President's Administration Mustafa Isen, and Deputy Culture Minister of Turkey Abdurahman Arici spoke about Pyragy's life and works, and called him one of the great figures of the Turkmen culture.
A Turkmen spiritual leader and philosophical poet who made significant efforts to secure independence and autonomy for his people in the 18th century, Magtymguly was one of the first Turkmen poets to use the classical Chagatai as a literary language, incorporating many Turkmen linguistic features.
Chagatai was the court language of the Khans of Central Asia.
As such, Magtymguly's poetry exemplifies a trend towards increased usage of Turkic languages (as opposed to Persian), and he is respected as the founder of Turkmen poetry, literature, and language.
Magtymguly is also widely considered holy among Turkmen communities, and his poems are often quoted as proverbs in Turkmen societies.
His poetry is often highly personal, but also takes up universal themes. His work includes elegies on the deaths of his father and children and disappearance of his brothers, incitements to Turkmen unity, tirades against unjust mullahs and khans, praise for religious figures (such as the Twelve Imams), and laments at losing his beloved to another.
It is not the first time TURKSOY, an international cultural organization of countries with Turkic populations whose speaking languages belong to the Turkic language family, holds such cultural events.
The organization's activities go back to the 1992 meetings in Baku and Istanbul, where the ministers of culture from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan declared their commitment to cooperate in a joint cultural framework.
TURKSOY was subsequently established under an agreement signed on July 12, 1993, in Almaty, Kazakhstan.