Kahramanmaraş: The city where every home produces a poet

UĞUR BATI

Let us consider a city. A place that is both provincial and central. Quiet, yet resonant. A city whose poets are recorded in biographical anthologies, whose madrasas produced scholars, whose dervish lodges nurtured poets and whose marketplaces echoed with the music of wandering minstrels. A river has flowed here uninterrupted since the sixteenth century — and that river is called Kahramanmaraş.

Yet one question remains: why? Why did Karacaoğlan count Maraş among the cities he visited most frequently? How did Sünbülzâde Vehbî emerge from a scholarly family in Maraş to become one of the greatest poets of his age? Why did figures such as Necip Fazıl, Sezai Karakoç, Cahit Zarifoğlu, Erdem Bayazıt, Nuri Pakdil and Rasim Özdenören all come from this soil? Is it merely a coincidence?

I do not believe so. What we encounter here is the result of centuries of cultural accumulation. Understanding these causes opens a door not only to Kahramanmaraş itself, but also to the story of Turkish literature.

Kahramanmaraş stands at a crossroads where three regions, climates and cultural spheres meet, nestled against the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. Trade routes passed through this landscape, migrations paused here and ideas traveled across generations. But geography also shaped the city’s inner world. Surrounded by mountains, marked by harsh winters and a demanding way of life, these lands encouraged not withdrawal but depth. Long winter nights created a culture of conversation and solitude often found its way into poetry.

To understand why language has been held in such high regard here, one must look at the city’s educational and spiritual traditions. During the Ottoman period, Kahramanmaraş developed a rich intellectual environment shaped by madrasas, Sufi lodges and scholarly families. The lodges taught people to regard words as sacred; the madrasas taught them how to shape those words.

The coexistence of these traditions created a literary culture built on both emotion and discipline. Sufism embraced poetry as a path to truth, while scholarly education provided mastery of language. Figures from Halîlî-i Maraşî to Sünbülzâde Vehbî drew from this atmosphere, where Arabic, Persian and Turkish formed a shared intellectual world. To write in three languages meant gaining access to the imagery, metaphors and poetic traditions of three civilizations.

Alongside this written tradition existed another powerful current: the minstrel-poet tradition. Karacaoğlan’s voice traveled from the Taurus Mountains to Syria and Rumelia, while later figures such as Âşık Yener, Mahzuni Şerif, Abdurrahim Karakoç and Hayati Vasfi Taşyürek carried this legacy forward.

The importance of this tradition lies in the way it brought poetry into everyday life. Poetry was not confined to books; it lived in ceremonies, gatherings, marketplaces and conversations. A child grew up hearing poetry before learning to understand it. Over time, its rhythms became part of the community’s inner world.

Perhaps the strongest reason behind Kahramanmaraş’s literary productivity is the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Its writers rarely emerged as isolated geniuses. They belonged to networks that read, debated, challenged and inspired one another. The emergence of the “Seven Beautiful Men” was not a coincidence, but the result of a living intellectual environment where coffeehouses sometimes functioned as informal academies.

Great poets often emerge through hardship. Oppression, uncertainty and loss push people inward and create a need for language. The generation of the Seven Beautiful Men transformed the tensions of their era into poetry, fiction, and essays. Even after the earthquakes of Feb. 6, 2023, Kahramanmaraş turned suffering into cultural renewal, rebuilding around the belief that “literature heals.”

The phrase “the city where every home produces a poet” is often used for Kahramanmaraş. Taken seriously, it reveals a deeper truth: poets do not emerge only from individual talent. They emerge from communities that breathe poetry.

In Kahramanmaraş, the dervish recited poetry, the madrasa taught its structure, the minstrel’s saz echoed through public spaces and a mother sang lullabies shaped by verse. A child raised in such an atmosphere enters life already prepared for poetry.

UNESCO’s designation of Kahramanmaraş as a City of Literature in 2025 brought this heritage to global attention. Yet the title is new; the tradition is ancient. The river that has flowed for five centuries was not carved in a single day.

The secret of Kahramanmaraş’s literary power lies not in a magical climate or coincidence. Great literature flourishes in communities that take language seriously — communities that produce it, consume it, teach it and pass it forward.

“Because we have our word” — Kahramanmaraş.

Behind these words stands not a single poet or title, but the voice of a civilization that has been speaking for five centuries.