Loading…
Two thousand folktales collected from Turkish villages, coffeehouses and kitchens beginning in 1961 — searchable here as short synopses, each linked to its original transcript.
The Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative was built by Ahmet E. Uysal, Warren S. Walker and Barbara K. Walker, who began recording storytellers across Turkey in 1961 and kept at it for four decades. They travelled to villages, sat in coffeehouses and kitchens, and wrote down what people told them — more than two thousand tales, each with the narrator's name, the village, the district, the date, and often the collectors' own footnotes explaining a custom or a turn of phrase.
The archive is held by the Southwest Collection / Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University, which digitised it and makes the full transcripts freely available at swco-ir.tdl.org. All of the work of collecting, translating, annotating and preserving these tales is theirs. This page is only an index built on top of it.
The cards above are short synopses, not the tales themselves. Each one is a summary generated from the archive's own scanned transcript, written to make a collection this large browsable — so that a storyteller can find a tale worth telling without reading two thousand pages first.
Every card links to the original PDF and to its record in the Texas Tech repository. If a tale interests you, go and read the real thing — the transcript carries the narrator's voice, the collectors' notes, and all the texture a synopsis flattens out. The footnotes reproduced on each card are the collectors' own, kept verbatim because they are scholarship in their own right.
Where a narrator's family memleket is recorded separately from where a tale was collected, both are kept — a story told in Istanbul by someone whose people are from Sivas is marked as such.