Karagöz and Hacivat shadow puppet shows are among the favorite activities organized in many places during Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. Karagöz represents an illiterate but straightforward public and Hacivat is a low-ranking official who uses a poetic and literary language. Hacivat speaks Ottoman Turkish and completely baffles Karagöz, who usually gets the wrong end of the stick by mistaking an Ottoman word for a similar sounding Turkish one, which of course has a totally different meaning, hence the ensuing comedy.Serkan Bilgi, the coordinator of the publishing house that designed the shadow puppets as a children’s toy, said their primary aim is to encourage children to be interested in toys at home rather than computer games.
Speaking to the Anatolia news agency on Friday, Bilgi noted that children only usually have an opportunity to watch Karagöz and Hacivat for one month a year, during Ramadan. He said not watching this puppet show would lead to parts of Turkish culture being forgotten. Every person living in Turkey should protect their cultural heritage, he said, underlining that the Karagöz and Hacivat shadow puppets date back 600 years.
“We want to show that children do not necessarily just like playing computer games. We believe that they also like watching Karagöz and Hacivat. Therefore, we were determined to produce a toy like this. There are five figures in the set, including Karagöz, Hacivat, Bebe Ruhi, Zenne and Çelebi as well as a stage and dozens of cards written with ‘mani,’ the rhyming couplets necessary for the dialogue between Karagöz and Hacivat. We took into consideration all the things that are necessary to reflect the soul of the Karagöz and Hacivat shadow puppet theater,” he said.
In 2009, a long-running debate between Turkey and Greece over which country the Karagöz and Hacivat tradition belonged to was ended by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which confirmed that the figures are part of the cultural heritage of Turkey and not Greece.
Bilgi said “Yar bana bir eğlence” or “Dear, entertain me,” part of the dialogue between Karagöz and Hacivat, will be heard from many homes because of this toy, which is priced at TL 27.
