Tombs of Yunus Emre within the context of multi-spatiality

Multi-spatiality is the concept in the folklore discipline that expresses the belief that narrative heroes are born or killed in multiple places. There isn't enough information about many narrative heroes created by the verbal culture, and the information about their lives exists in culture mostly through verbal narratives, making it difficult to place these personalities in a particular space. Legend and epic types, consisting of the biographies of narrative heroes with their high credibility characteristics, make it easy to believe they were born or died in more than one place. Many heroes with multi-spatial narratives have been the subject of academic research in Turkish culture history by intertwining their historical and legendary personalities. Perhaps the most notable of these is Yunus Emre, known to have lived in the 13th century. Yunus Emre is a narrative hero about whom biographies and poems are produced, and on whose life the written sources are insufficient. The variation in the biography and poems of Yunus Emre can also be seen in his burial place. Yunus Emre, whose tomb was found in 14 places in Turkey, is a multi-spatial narrative hero. It is necessary and important to accept Yunus Emre as a narrative hero and to examine the tombs with folklore approaches. This thesis examines Yunus Emre in terms of the multi-spatiality concept, and the dynamics that create multi-spatiality have been revealed, taking the Yunus Emre tombs as the epitome. The memory of Yunus Emre constructed in the spaces was determined with different aspects during the field studies conducted in 2017, 2018 and 2019 on 14 tombs believed to belong to Yunus Emre. Then, the information obtained from the field study was evaluated in the context of multi-spatiality with the approaches of folk science. The dynamics revealing the multi-spatiality in the thesis are discussed in the axis of multi-spatiality with narrative and fakelore. In the relationship between space and narrative, localization, memory transfer and dream narratives are effective and enable the multi-spatialism. In the relationship of the place with fakelore, invented tradition and folklorism, the discussions on the burial place and the practices in the spaces are effective elements. In this study, the multi-spatiality concept has been evaluated with a folk-scientific point of view in the epitome of Yunus Emre tombs, and the reasons for this phenomenon were questioned. This thesis also offers new and versatile perspectives from the perspective of folklore to researchers who plan to study multi-site narrative heroes and Yunus Emre.