PREFACE

THE stories comprising this collection have been culled with my own hands in the many-hued garden of Turkish folk-lore. They have not been gathered from books, for Turkey is not a literary land, and no books of the kind exist, but, an attentive listener to "the story-tellers" who form a peculiar feature of the social life of the Ottomans, I have jotted them down from time to time, and now present them, a choice bouquet, to the English reading public....

These tales are by no means identical with, nor do they even resemble, those others that have been assimilated by the European consciousness from Indian sources and the "Arabian Nights." All real Turkish fairy tales are quite independent of those; rather are they related to the Western type so far as their contents and structure are concerned. Indeed, they may only be placed in the category of Oriental tales in that they are permeated with the cult of Islam and that their characters are Moslems....

Turkish fairy tales are as crystal, reflecting the sun's rays in a thousand dazzling colours; clear as a cloudless sky; and transparent like the dew upon a budding rose. In short, Turkish fairy tales are not the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, but of the Thousand and One Days.

I.K.

From the book