{{Short description|Form of oral history in West and Central Asia}} {{Other uses|Dastaan (disambiguation){{!}}Dastaan}} [[File:Kyrgyz Manaschi, Karakol.jpg|thumb|right|A traditional Kyrgyz ''manaschi'' performing part of the epic poem (dastan) at a yurt camp in Karakol]] '''Dastan''' ({{langx|fa|داستان|dâstân|story, tale}})<ref>{{cite book|last=Steingass|first=Francis Joseph|author-link=Francis Joseph Steingass|title=A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, Including the Arabic Words and Phrases to Be Met with in Persian Literature|place=London|publisher=Routledge & K. Paul|year=1892|url=https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.2:1:5495.steingass|archive-url=https://archive.today/20120707181633/http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.2:1:5495.steingass|url-status=dead|archive-date=July 7, 2012}}{{Page needed|date=November 2018}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Russell|first=Ralph|author-link=Ralph Russell|year=1992|title=The Pursuit of Urdu Literature: A Select History|place=London and New Jersey|publisher=Zed Books|page=85|isbn=1-85649-029-7}}</ref> is an ornate form of oral history, an epic, from Central Asia, Iran, Turkey and Azerbaijan.
A dastan is generally centered on one individual who protects his tribe or his people from an outside invader or enemy, although only occasionally can this figure be traced back to a historical person.<ref name=FountainInk>{{cite news|last=Krishnan|first=Nandini|title=Dastaan-e-Dastangoi|url=http://fountainink.in/?p=1947&all=1|accessdate=20 December 2012|newspaper=Fountain Ink|date=4 May 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121114013446/http://fountainink.in/?p=1947&all=1|archive-date=2012-11-14|url-status=live}}</ref> This main character sets an example of how one should act, and the dastan becomes a teaching tool — for example the Sufi master and Turkic poet Ahmed Yesevi said "Let the scholars hear my wisdom, treating my words like a dastan".<ref>{{Cite book|last=Paksoy|first=H. B.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_KkOGNefbfsC&dq=Let+the+scholars+hear+my+wisdom%2C+treating+my+words+like+a+dastan&pg=PT7|title=Alpamysh: Central Asian Identity Under Russian Rule|date=1989|publisher=AACAR|isbn=978-0-9621379-9-0|language=en}}</ref> Alongside the wisdom, each dastan is rich with cultural history of interest to scholars.
During the Russian conquest of Central Asia, many new dastans were created to protest the Russian occupation. It is possible that they came into contact and influenced each other. According to Turkish historian Hasan Bülent Paksoy, the Bolsheviks tried to destroy these symbols of culture by only publishing them in insufficiently large quantities and in a distorted form "in order to weaken the heroic impact".<ref>{{cite book|last=Paksoy|first=H.B.|author-link=Hasan Bülent Paksoy|chapter-url=http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/paksoy-6/cae05.html|chapter=Dastan Genre in Central Asia|title=Essays on Central Asia|year=1999|place=Lawrence|publisher=Carrie|pages=82|oclc=45603165}}</ref>
A notable dastan is ''Korkut Ata'' of the Oghuz Turks — which may have been created as early as the beginning of the 13th century.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Meeker|first=Michael E.|title=The Dede Korkut Ethic|journal=International Journal of Middle East Studies|volume=24|issue=3|date=August 1992|pages=395–417|doi=10.1017/S0020743800021954|quote=The ''Book of Dede Korkut'' is an early record of oral Turkic folktales in Anatolia, and as such, one of the mythic charters of Turkish nationalist ideology. The oldest versions of the ''Book of Dede Korkut'' consist of two manuscripts copied in the 16th century. The twelve stories that are recorded in these manuscripts are believed to be derived from a cycle of stories and songs circulating among Turkic peoples living in northeastern Anatolia and northwestern Azerbaijan. According to Lewis (1974), an older substratum of these oral traditions dates to conflicts between the ancient Oghuz and their Turkish rivals in Central Asia (the Pecheneks and the Kipchaks), but this substratum has been clothed in references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Akkoyunlu Confederation of Turkic tribes against the Georgians, the Abkhaz, and the Greeks in Trebizond. Such stories and songs would have emerged no earlier than the beginning of the 13th century, and the written versions that have reached us would have been composed no later than the beginning of the 15th century. By this time, the Turkic peoples in question had been in touch with Islamic civilization for several centuries, had come to call themselves “Turcoman” rather than “Oghuz,” had close associations with sedentary and urbanized societies, and were participating in Islamized regimes that included nomads, farmers, and townsmen. Some had abandoned their nomadic way of life altogether.}}</ref>
In Karakalpak and other Turkic cultures, there are two kinds of ''dastan'': the ''baqsï'' sings lyrical epics containing stories about love and adventure (which Karl Reichl compares to medieval Western romance), accompanied by the dutar; ''zhyrau'' sing heroic epics, accompanied by the kobyz.<ref>{{cite book |last=Reichl |first=Karl |year=2007 |title=Edige: A Karakalpak Heroic Epic, as performed by Jumabay Bazarov |location=Helsinki |publisher=Academia Scientiarum Fennica |pages=17-18}}</ref>
==See also== *Alpamysh *Baqsï *Dastangoi *Epic of Manas *Epic of Koroghlu *List of Urdu prose dastans *Dastan in Yazidi literature *Zhyrau
==References== <references/>
Category:Azerbaijani folklore Category:Culture of Central Asia Category:Iranian folklore Category:Oral history Category:Persian words and phrases Category:Kyrgyz folklore Category:Turkic culture Category:Turkish folklore Category:Uyghur music