Ahmed Bican Yazıcıoğlu (? - ca. 1466) was an Ottoman author.
The dervish and scholar Ahmed Bican Yazıcıoğlu was a propagandist of the Turkish language. He himself wrote in Turkish, and he translated and compiled literature on the basis of works in the dominant language, Arabic. He is considered to be one of the most important figures of Ottoman culture. The famous legend about the founding of Istanbul can be traced back to his Dürr-i Meknûn.
Yazıcıoğlu came from a literary family. His father, Salih Yazıcı as well as his brother Mehmed Yazıcıoğlu, are well known writers, even today. The grave monuments in Gelibolu for Ahmed and Mehmed are tourist attractions.
Little is known of Yazıcıoğlu's life. We do know that he belonged to the Bayramiyye order and that he lived in Gelibolu (Gallipoli). 'Bican' is a nickname: the Lifeless; in addition to religious fasting, he advocated foregoing sleeping at night. Yazıcıoğlu wrote a number of popular religious and encyclopaedic works, which were transcribed and printed over the centuries. His best known books are the religious work Envârü’l- ‘âşıkîn and the Dürr-i Meknûn.
The Dürr-i Meknûn approaches the world from the Creation according to cosmographic tradition. Details about the heavenly bodies are followed by tales of ancient peoples, prophecies and divine punishments, discourses on stones, images, medicinal plants, mythical creatures, faraway countries, seas and islands with their bizarre inhabitants such as the cynocephali. The author concludes with a chapter about the terrors that await us at the end of the world, including the islamic Antichrist: the Dajjal.
A remarkable passage in the Dürr-i Meknûn is Yazıcıoğlu’s fulminating against the deer- and spring-worshipping by Ottomans, a heathen cult within the empire. Another important passage in this book is a tale about Kenan (Ken‘an), one of the sons of Nuh (Noah). Kenan refuses to join his father in the Ark, and hopes to survive the Great Flood in a kind of diving bell that he devises himself. God punishes him for his disobedience with a supernatural bladder infection and Ken'an drowns in his urine inside his own contraption.
Main works: Envârü’l- ‘âşıkîn (unclear: often 1451 is given, sometimes 1446, 1449, etc.) and Dürr-i Meknûn (year of writing unknown and much disputed)
Other books by Ahmed Bican Yazıcıoğlu are the Aca'ibu'l-mahlukat (1453) Kitabü 'l-müntehã al müstehã ala 'l-fusûs (1465), Bostãnü 'l-hakã'ik (1466), Cevãhirnãme, Ravhü 'l-ervãh.
The version of the legend of the Town’s foundation as Ottomans and Turks know it was coined by Ahmed Bican. According to this tale, Yanko bin Madyan (the name has its origin in a misspelling and or misreading in the Ottoman Turkish writing of the word ‘Nikomedian’) decided to build the city on a ‘wedge shaped’ plot of land, triangled between two sea arms. To make sure building activities would commence under an auspicious constellation, his astronomers deviced a system of poles with bells and cords attached to them, to set the army of diggers, masons etc. to work at the same right time: “Alas, man proposes, God disposes.” A snake snatched by a local stork curled itself around the bird’s neck, thus causing it to fall out of the sky, against one of the bells, thereby setting on the entire enterprise in the most ominous of hours, that of the planet Mars. Inevitably, the future of the city was to be rife with earthquakes, war and plagues.[1]
This legend, partly a clever reworking of already existing elements in Byzantine tales and of Muslim views on Constantinople reaching from the imperial to the apocalytic, deeply influenced Ottoman sentiments (quite a few felt the City to be intrinsically alien) and literature on this topic.[2]
