Eastren Karadeniz legends

Man always questioned and tried to understand the world in which he lived from the time he first appeared on the stage of history until today. At first, people explained the nature and natural incidents according to themselves and as a result, the the legends of that time emerged. New legends emerged in unison with the society's cultural level and with the era in which the people lived. Legends are the products of man's imagination and intelligence. Although legends are not national as sagas, they refelect the society's cultural level and way of life. They lead mankind to the good, to the fine and to the true. Here, with this study, we tried to write down our legends, which are our national culture's oral products and which are going to disappear rapidly. Until now, in Turkey and in other countries many texts were collected about legends and scientific studies were carried out. Especially in europe, the studies about this subject goes back to 1990s. A few legends belonging to Trabzon, Rize and Artvin which are our study area, were collected and written down by amateur researchers. But, a wide and academic study in this area was not carried out until now. For this reason, the Eastern Karadeniz (Black Sea) region, is a virgin area which must be dealt with. The study area is vast, the residence is scattered because of rough land the conditions of communication make impossible to reach the whole resources. For these reasons, apart from direct collection, method, indirect collection method was also obligatory. The collections were carried out through cassettes and then deciphered on writing. After that, the material was arranged and each legend was divided into its episodes. To make it appear complete stylistically, it was re-written by the researcher. In Korder not to reiterate, the variations were not written, only their different parts were shown on footnotes. In the last section of the study, the legends were shortly evalvated.