Education,training and mentorship in Anatolian tezkires

Poet tezkires/biographies are important sources for literary studies as they provide information about the lives of poets and their contemporaries, the periods in which the poets lived, the poetic traditions and social life in the relevant period. As well as providing the reader with clues to contemplate upon the past, poetic tezkires also function as valuable literary texts in Turkish literature, since they present essential information for the study of social, cultural and political influences on the literature of the specific period in which they are written. When examined with a chronological and holistic approach that takes the cause and effect relationships between each of them into consideration, tezkires can yield important information about a particular literary subject matter. Examining Anatolian tezkires from the 16th century to the 20th century, this study focuses on the education, training and mentorship provided for the Ottoman poets in Anatolia as well as how and by whom they were raised. The core materials for the study were the tezkires in which the focus are subjects of education and training in order to attain a better understanding of the educational and training-related concepts of the era, the process in which these concepts turned into new terms and became part of the educational jargon, and the lives of outstanding poets with regard to their merit in mentoring others. Accordingly, this study provides important information about the literary environment and the way the poets were received and educated. The study uses the material in the tezkires and make use of relevant statistical data to provide a thorough analysis and assessment of the training and education of the Ottoman poets. Keywords: The Anatolian poetic tezkires, concepts of education and training in tezkires, mentor and mentorship in tezkires.